No Sacred Cows

The deeper and broader thought becomes, the harder it is to sustain the rigid binaries on which much of the populist right depends: native and foreign, deserving and undeserving, loyal and traitorous, normal and deviant. “Us” and “them”.

Greater understanding reveals causes, alternatives, competing perspectives and unintended consequences. It makes scapegoating more difficult because it prevents people from being flattened into categories. Complexity does not make judgement impossible, but it makes absolute certainty less defensible.

“The fundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt” – Bertrand Russell

Doubt, in this sense, is not weakness. It is the recognition that one’s own perspective is limited. The more alternatives a mind can perceive, the less plausible simple explanations become. The more perspectives it can inhabit, the harder it becomes to divide the world confidently into the wholly righteous and the wholly contemptible.

Have you ever wondered why so many scientists, philosophers, historians, writers, musicians, actors, comedians, film-makers and public intellectuals seem instinctively to recoil from authoritarian and far-right politics? Perhaps it is because their disciplines require them to step outside themselves, to test assumptions, imagine other lives, tolerate ambiguity, revise conclusions and recognise structures larger than their own experience.

“I can live with doubt and uncertainty and not knowing” – Richard Feynman

“The presence of those seeking the truth is infinitely to be preferred to the presence of those who think they’ve found it” – Terry Pratchett

The scientist learns that knowledge remains provisional. Philosophers, psychologists and anthropologists discover the assumptions concealed within apparent certainties. The historian learns that the past is never as simple as the myths made from it. The artist enters lives unlike their own, while the comedian notices the absurdity of those who mistake their particular prejudices for the natural order of the universe.

Empathy begins in that decentralisation. It is not merely an emotion directed towards other human beings, but a recognition that reality is experienced from more than one centre. Other people, other animals and perhaps forms of consciousness we have not yet encountered are not merely objects within our world. They are centres of value within worlds of their own, and no centre becomes morally negligible merely because it is not ours.

Reactionary politics resists this enlargement. It promises restored boundaries, recovered purity and a return to an imaginary past. It reduces historical and social complexity to enemies, betrayals and slogans, deriving much of its emotional force from narrowing the moral circle while presenting that narrowing as strength.

Science and art generally move in the opposite direction. They enlarge the world faster than we can accommodate it.

“Isn’t this enough? Just this world? Just this beautiful, complex, wonderfully unfathomable natural world?” – Tim Minchin

We have scarcely begun to understand that world. Every veil removed reveals another order of complexity, and every discovery opens another universe of questions. Artificial intelligence may eventually surpass us on a scale we have yet to fathom, yet even a vastly superior intelligence may find itself confronting horizons that recede forever. Knowledge may not culminate in certainty at all, but in an ever deeper awareness of mystery.

The cosmic perspective makes our political pretensions seem smaller still. Carl Sagan placed every human claim to grandeur within a single devastating perspective:

“Every ‘supreme leader’ in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam”

Every emperor, conqueror, dictator, revolutionary, prophet, king, billionaire, nationalist strongman and self-appointed saviour of civilisation lived briefly upon the same almost invisible particle, along with every border ever fought over, every flag ever waved and every certainty ever proclaimed.

For Sagan, this was not an argument for nihilism, but for humility and kindness. Cosmic insignificance does not make experience worthless – it makes our claims to supremacy ridiculous. We may occupy an infinitesimal place while remaining, to one another, centres of consciousness and value.

Seen against that scale, the politics of Trump, Farage, Putin, Kim Jong Un and their kind is simply pathetic: grievance mistaken for insight, domination for greatness, exclusion for order and confidence for truth.

This is where an interesting pattern emerges. As a thought experiment, choose your idol – perhaps a thinker, scientist, philosopher, historian, writer, musician, comedian, actor, film-maker or public intellectual who enlarged your sense of the world. Pick Socrates, Aristotle, Confucius, Gandhi, Mandela, Sagan, Attenborough, Jane Goodall, Einstein, Hawking, Brian Cox, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Rachel Carson, Oppenheimer, Russell, Camus, Hannah Arendt, Simone de Beauvoir, Noam Chomsky, Orwell, Václav Havel, Umberto Eco, Gabriel García Márquez, Vonnegut, Ursula Le Guin, Margaret Atwood, James Baldwin, Huxley, Virginia Woolf, Salman Rushdie, Toni Morrison, Pratchett, Douglas Adams, Kurosawa, Miyazaki, Chaplin, Orson Welles, Kubrick, Richard Attenborough, Emma Thompson, Ian McKellen, Ken Loach, Mike Leigh, Lennon, Nina Simone, Joan Baez, Dylan, Leonard Cohen, Paul Robeson, Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, Joni Mitchell, Tracy Chapman, Springsteen, Sting, Peter Gabriel, Annie Lennox, Joe Strummer, Billy Bragg, Stephen Fry, Tim Minchin, Billy Connolly, David Mitchell, George Carlin, Bill Hicks, Stewart Lee, Armando Iannucci, Alexei Sayle, John Oliver, Jon Stewart, Mary Beard, David Olusoga, Simon Schama, Jacob Bronowski, James Burke, Adam Curtis, Louis Theroux or Jon Ronson… the list is virtually endless.

Of course they are not politically identical. Some disagreed profoundly with one another, and some would undoubtedly have disliked being grouped together at all. Yet across this extraordinarily varied company, similar instincts repeatedly emerge: curiosity rather than certainty, complexity rather than slogans, empathy rather than exclusion, scepticism towards power, concern for those beyond their own tribe, and an awareness that reality is vastly larger, stranger and more interconnected than the stories told by authoritarians.

The list proves nothing by itself, but it is suggestive. Especially if you attempt the reverse exercise. Try assembling an equally long list of humanity’s most admired scientists, philosophers, historians, writers, musicians, comedians and artists whose work naturally leads towards Farage, Trump, Putin, Orbán, Le Pen, Reform, Restore or similar movements. You will struggle to do so without stretching the categories, confusing traditional conservatism with authoritarian populism, or deceiving yourself about the beliefs of the people you enlist. The difficulty of attempting to do so should itself tell you something.

Intelligence does not inevitably produce progressive politics, creativity does not inevitably produce compassion, and science does not inevitably produce wisdom. Yet again and again, those who spend their lives exploring reality in all its complexity seem to emerge with a similar understanding – that certainty is dangerous, that other perspectives matter, that human beings are not the centre of everything, and that the world is always larger than the story currently being told about it.

The reality from which we derive purpose and meaning is larger than nations, ideologies and humanity itself, larger than any intelligence we may one day create and larger than anything we can presently imagine. We remain what Sagan saw us to be – inhabitants of a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam, briefly wondering about the universe before disappearing back into it.

“For small creatures such as we, the vastness is bearable only through love” – Ann Druyan, in Carl Sagan’s Contact