In conversation with Jeremy Shearmur
In the 1960s the London School of Economics (LSE) was in a rare and fascinating position – it had a walking, talking, godlike presence hanging over it. A name that everyone already knew would soon be carved into statues – and who would define the institution for centuries to come – was alive and amongst them. He only turned-up once a week, but by then that was enough. From being the first (and only) staff member in the Department of Logic and Scientific Method, to forming a research academy and attracting a remarkable list of international students and colleagues, Karl Popper had made the LSE his own, in a number of ways.
This was the strange world that Jeremy Shearmur walked into as a fresh-faced undergraduate student. Popper was not the kind of professor to waste his time on the grind and repetition of teaching, but in those corridors and those lecture halls, and in the language of his professors, Shearmur could see a firm and domineering shadow:
I had a ‘Popperian’ education in philosophy, but largely not from Popper.
I am struck, when looking back at my time at the L.S.E., by the fact that Popper’s approach to philosophy was at the center of the course, but the Department was characterised by lively debates about it, rather than its uncritical acceptance.
When those undergraduate days were finally out of the way, Shearmur briefly erred between pursuing a PhD and a career in librarianship. And it was while testing the waters of this latter path during a graduate apprenticeship at Durham University library, when a remarkable opportunity fell into his lap. The then-assistant to Karl Popper was leaving his post, and a quick replacement was needed. Through word-of-mouth the position was offered to Shearmur; he responded like this: “The answer was yes: it was, for me, a bit as if a young Catholic had been asked if he wanted to work as personal assistant to the Pope!”
With the leader revered and elevated above everyone else, a flock of adoring acolytes dropping everything important in their lives for the opportunity to be a part of things, and a healthy dose of fear and insecurity and insignificance and punishment hanging in the air, the Popperian Church was, unmistakably, church-like. But this was also a church, and a Pope, who refused and rebelled against infallibility and claims to higher knowledge. The papal robes were torn and muddied, the stained glass cracked and unwashed, and the people who attended regular mass were loud, aggressive, and critical… of everything.
When he wasn’t ferrying library materials to Popper’s home or chasing-down obscure translations, Shearmur began to sniff-out his own role within the church, something beyond his current-position of altar boy; he started looking for problems within Popper’s philosophy. And what Shearmur found was a world both too small, and too expansive, at the same time. He saw unnatural and unnecessary limitations tying-down and restricting the possibilities of critical rationalism. In his mind, criticism should be stretched beyond science and into metaphysics; after all, knowledge of all kinds is a “social phenomenon”.
If we put logic, formalization and technical nit-picking back in its proper box, this will enable us to reflect on wider issues which were opened up in The Logic of Scientific Discovery but were not pursued there. This includes the role of ‘methodological rules’ (which, I have suggested elsewhere, may be understood in partly sociological terms). This would, at once, get rid of the artificial division between critical rationalism and sociological approaches to knowledge, but would allow us to pursue the latter with a Popperian concern for critical appraisal and the improvement of our institutions.
Embrace just such an approach, break those barriers free, and what do we get according to Shearmur? A new, important, and central appreciation for classical liberalism.
It is one of those wonderful products of history which, due to its success and adoption in the world, has lost much of its gloss and meaning and value. The roots of classical liberalism drag us back to medieval Europe, to Britain, to kings, monarchs, duties to god, and the idea that individual rights are due to the generosity of governments – loving gifts that cannot be turned around as weapons against those same governments.
Classical liberalism emerges in this moment – insisting upon a sea change in our understanding of those rights. Rights are not gifted to us but rather owed to us. It is also not the role of government to present us with our rights but to protect them against encroachment. And when they cannot live up to this, or when they are the ones doing the encroaching, then those same rights are what we use to remove and replace them with someone better. Classical liberalism turns-around the bulk of human history and places consent at the centre of governance.
And in many ways this sounds Popperian… but also in many ways it is not! The problem begins first with drawing a line between the Two Karl Poppers. The earlier Popper, writing in The Open Society and Its Enemies, was a much more interventionist man, worrying about the dangers of “unregulated capitalism” and preferring a firm hand of state control within economic life. The later Popper twists out of this and lands on a streamlined, minimalist, indirect view of the state, whose role is never, ever, to attempt anything as presumptuous as to try and make people happy.
This, it appears, is where we can find the slow-working influence of Popper’s old friend at the LSE, Friedrich Hayek, and the entry point for negative utilitarianism (seeking to only reduce or minimise disvalue, rather than trying to maximise value). Here the state, in all its power and reach, is largely asleep behind the wheel, only ever shaking itself awake – and to action – in order to protect individual freedoms. Why would anyone want such a thing, why would anyone hope for a largely impotent government?
It adds to clarity in the field of ethics if we formulate our demands negatively, i.e., if we demand the elimination of suffering rather than the promotion of happiness. Similarly, it is helpful to formulate the task of scientific method as the elimination of false theories (from the various theories tentatively proferred) rather than the attainment of established Truths.
Just how that ethical clarity and the elimination of false theories comes about needs some explaining. And here Friedrich Hayek’s firm hand can almost be seen beneath Popper’s ink as he begins to explain the raw, exposed, uncorrupted, and constantly reaffirmed relationship between buyer and seller.
It may not feel like it for most people, but every time you wander into a store of any flavour, hand over your money, and walk out with a product of any kind in its place, you are becoming an important and indispensable part of an epistemological loop. A clean and unambiguous system of accountability, reaffirmed anew with each and every purchase.
Famously for Popper, knowledge creation is a process of conjectures and refutations. And that refutation part can often feel like the trickiest. It is where we test our theories against reality and against other theories… it is where other people begin to really scuff things up. The laws, the culture, the institutions, the bureaucracies that we build all have a logic behind them, a reason for their creation and for how they look. They tighten our hold on certain things. They protect us, and our values, from unwanted, poorly conceived, and short-sighted criticism. They prevent some of that scuffing!
And so we have a problem! Albeit a problem that doesn’t immediately sound like one.
Imagine that you are an activist at some point in our recent history – someone with truth and justice on your side. You fight and you suffer and you are arrested and you lose your job and are threatened. Yet each day you continue, no matter the cost.
At first it is just you! Then slowly another activist joins you on those streets, then two, then a handful… After decades of this a majority of your fellow citizens are on your side; you have very slowly, bit by bit, managed to convince a country of voters to correct its errors. Old discriminatory laws are rescinded, better ones are adopted in their place, and as far as you can see – as far as morality and law touches your life – things are changed for the better.
But none of this lets you sleep any easier at night… not yet! People can be frivolous and manipulated, they often change their minds, and if you could convince them to drop their previous, deeply held, beliefs (as you just did), then what is there to stop your enemies from doing the same? Tomorrow they might rally their troops, resharpen their arguments, copy your tactics, take to the streets, and eventually persuade everyone to walk back all those changes that you fought so hard for.
So to protect your achievements you decide to build something around them, something resilient to shifts of opinion and protest, something isolated from the whims of those masses. You create an institution! Through a series of steps, hierarchies, procedures, and bureaucracy you clog the muscles of your enemies with a rich and sustaining lactic acid. From here out, social change becomes more arduous, painful, time consuming, and ambiguous.
But this still won’t do it, this still doesn’t seem safe enough. So you decide to wrap your hard-fought progress up in a new type of reactive culture, one that says ‘To question this is evil, to try and change this is hateful, and to even doubt this is bigotry’. And it often works… because, as chance would have it, it is simply much easier to centralise knowledge (moral knowledge in this case) than it is to create it.
Here we find ourselves at a place of good intentions, and yet somewhere profoundly un-Popperian. For Popper error is all around us, at all times; so much so that error is the natural state of things. Which is why that second part of Popper’s epistemology (refutation) matters so much. Surrounded in all directions by so many wrong ideas, the only hope we have to make any sort of progress is to actively seek out these mistakes, and to remove them wherever they are found. We must embrace a wet blanket of constant and biting criticism. And we must avoid the creation of hollowed-out spaces in society, spaces where criticism is seen not as a corrective but as a problem.
Back to Hayek! Back to negative utilitarianism! Back to those impotent governments and a little more “clarity”. Well-meaning errors of the kind mentioned above find life within an open marketplace much less hospitable. So this time imagine a different pathway in life: instead of being an activist out to change the world, you are a small business owner out to get rich. And you start where all things do – with a problem… multiple problems.
You are hungry and cold (problem) so at first you look for a job to buy food and clothes (conjectured solution), but no one will hire you (criticism). Still in need of money (problem) you decide to sell your skills, labour and time by, for example, fixing shoes on a street corner (conjectured solution). You make some money, but not enough (criticism) and you don’t enjoy the work (criticism again). You decide to change the scale of your business (conjectured solution), and to make things a little more comfortable on yourself you rent a small shop and fill the shelves with products that you think people want to buy (conjectured solution again).
No customers enter your shop (criticism). You decide that you need a better location, somewhere with more human traffic, but when you move your shop across town (conjectured solution) despite now having plenty of customers browsing your shelves, no one ever buys anything (criticism). You need new/better products so you get a bank loan and invest in new merchandise (conjectured solution). About half of your new products begin to sell quickly, but the others remain unwanted and untouched (criticism). You use your profits to replace your poorly selling merchandise with different ones (conjectured solution).
Now about 60% of your products are selling reasonably well, but the other 40% are still cluttering-up your shelves (criticism). You continue error-correcting like this in a piecemeal fashion (conjectured solutions), but trends and shopping habits all change (more criticisms), and you are always chasing the tastes of your customers (endless conjectured solutions). You are also constantly discovering new and unexpected ways in which you are failing to meet their expectations (endless criticism).
It all sounds exhausting! But this is the case for all knowledge. And in this unhindered marketplace, where everyone has the free choice of what they sell and what they buy (and at what price), knowledge is being created at an incredible pace; with every single transaction.
So now imagine yourself in a much more familiar and intuitive position (at least for most people): being asked, as we are at every election, to choose how we want to distribute goods and services around the community; and to decide upon a way of life. To do this you can place your trust in politics and political leaders, with all their inherent leanings toward compromise, avarice, and corruption. Or you can follow Hayek’s lead and embrace the free flow of conjectures and refutations, of trial and error, of delicate fine-tuning to the needs and desires of the community, to a place where critical feedback is thick in the air.
And in appropriately Popperian ways, it is a place that doesn’t ask much from us… nor anyone!
Few things have the ability to drown most people in intellectual deep water quite like macroeconomic theory with all its talk of opportunity costs, supply chains, globalisation, sovereign risk factors, surpluses, deficits, recessions, depressions, elasticity, liquidity, seasonal adjustments, asset turn-over, marginal standings, business cycles, companies, industries, resources, gross domestic product, inflation, stagflation, classicalism, Keynesianism, monetarism… And yet none of it matters, none of it is necessary, none of it needs to be understood in order for you – or anyone – to participate.
It is an argument that former British Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, often used against the overreach of the state. With all the might and time and resources that governments have, they are in unique positions to understand all that terminology above, in all its detail and permutations. In fact, this is what they work so hard to achieve – developing grand theories and predictions for every corner of economic life, from the largest corporation to the smallest transaction. And yet despite all the resources they have, and despite knowing all that they do, they consistently get it all very wrong! Their predictions fail, their theories collapse, and so they start again with another grand enterprise.
The error that they are making has to do with – in hard Thatcherite terms – “local knowledge”. It is a mistake so common, and so hard to shake, that we have all fallen for it/suffered from it ourselves.
Back to our imagination, and with a lack of appreciation for local knowledge turned against us. It could be a new law passed through parliament, a new ethical guidance for your workplace, a new regulation for your community, or simply, perhaps, a recommendation from a friend. Regardless, someone, somewhere, has decided to solve a problem for you, whether you recognise it as a problem or not. And to do this they have either worked their way down to you from an all-encompassing theory, or have worked their way across (or up) to you via an extrapolation from their experience, and their own local knowledge.
There you are, handed these solutions, this reform agenda from afar, and almost immediately you realise that none of it will work! Perhaps it might somewhere else, but it misses all the particulars and challenges of your situation. There are too many small details missing, too many problems that are overlooked, not enough understanding of why things currently look the way they do, not nearly enough nuance… not enough local knowledge!
The beauty of using the marketplace as our primary source of knowledge creation – of conjectures and refutations – is that no such imposition of this kind should ever happen. And going back to an earlier statement, it never even asks for it. Local knowledge is enough!
It might sound counterintuitive, but there is nothing inherently parochial about everyone doing their own thing, in their own little space, making their own decisions and solving their own problems. Just as with various different scientific breakthroughs all coming together from different corners of society to form a single body of science, this can also be the case with political and economic knowledge. Indeed it is how culture works, silently stitching together a patchwork of truth and pragmatism. No one ever needs to know everything, nor to legislate for everyone and every behaviour. Knowledge always works best as a collaborative exercise… sharing it is enough! Just as you don’t need to understand heart surgery to benefit from heart surgery, you don’t need to understand all the connected details of a supply chain to prosper from that supply chain.
If so much that we value can be pieced together from market forces, then why have governments at all? What’s the point in having them, especially when their existence and tendency toward bureaucratisation, to institutionalisation, to overreach, is such a risk. The answer: we need them as back-ups to ensure trust within those marketplaces; as the enforcers of contract law, of bankruptcy law, to protect private property, and so on. They are there to ensure that anarchy and power wielded by the strong can never step into our lives and shake us from our freedoms… the very same freedoms that allowed that market to work in the first place.
Governments are also there to smooth out the jagged moral corners of society, to hand us pensions when we get old, to deliver us health care when we get sick, and social welfare when we lack the basics in life. All the things that we believe are necessary, yet which the invisible hand of the marketplace hasn’t yet got around to providing a complete enough answer for. Finding this balance was Hayek’s great challenge, and one which we are still fumbling with today. Finding the line between the philosophies of Popper and Hayek remains with us too. Though Shearmur has a partial answer:
The crucial difference between Popper and Hayek... is that while they both make use of epistemological argument for a broadly liberal position, Popper’s views centre on the fallibility of scientific knowledge, while Hayek is concerned not with scientific knowledge but with political lessons which might be extracted from what could be called the social division of information. Further to this, central to Popper’s vision of politics is the political imposition of a shared ethical agenda, through a process of trial and error: of piecemeal social engineering. What is central for Hayek are markets and their associated institutions which, on his account, form a kind of skeleton for a free society—one which, at the same time, enables us to make cooperative use of socially divided knowledge, and to enjoy a broadly ‘negative’ conception of individual freedom.
So what can, and should, we expect from a re-embrace of classical Hayekian liberalism? Not much. Only that it is better at knowledge creation, and so also better at ordering society, than all other less free alternatives. It all hinges around what all that freedom allows for: a roaring and constant flood of criticism. And with that comes the quick exposure of errors, and their quick correction to something better. With that flood of criticism comes an equally large flood of knowledge creation. And so it also stands exposed to its own refutation: all that needs to be shown to put classical liberalism in its grave, is that another system (whatever it may be) once implemented creates more knowledge, and does so more quickly. In that moment it would all be over. And this is easy to measure, just stare out at the world today and pay attention; this experiment is being run over-and-over before our eyes.
That being said, would it be possible to create a more centrally controlled society, with centrally planned institutions, which side-steps some of those market forces, which reaches deeper into our lives with more coercion and more regularity, and which also manages to produce more criticism than classical liberalism? A system where more is driven for, and more is demanded, than just an opening of space for dialogue and feedback. Rather a society where criticism is actively manufactured and applied, where people are coerced to seek out criticisms that they might not ordinarily find or care about, filling-in gaps that the market might miss, and adding more voices and opinions to the places where criticism already exists (similar to the way in which compulsory voting systems coerce people into thinking more about politics, policies and elections).
I suspect the answer is yes! If so, it will take some effort, carry with it a unique set of risks, and require knowledge that is yet to be born… still we should be open to the possibility.
God-like auras cultivate their own natural resentment. Churches fracture and fall precisely because they are churches. Pedestals are just unpleasant things to be around for too long. So perhaps it was appropriate that, in spite of all that he was, and all that he gave to the London School of Economics, it wasn’t until 1995 that a statue of Karl Popper made its way onto campus. And even then it was a donation from the Austrian President, Thomas Klestil – a small bronze bust now catching dust in the quiet halls of the philosophy department.
It is likely that Popper would approve of all this understatement – the lionisation of people or ideas is often the first step towards shielding them from criticism; criticism that Popper would have insisted upon hearing.
But I suspect even he – if alive today – might bristle when, upon taking a tour of his former campus, and looking around all that new architecture, he would realise that amongst the redevelopments, and changes in design and infrastructure, that his old office had been cleaned of his belongings, his name pried unceremoniously from the door, and the empty space turned into a public toilet!
*** The Popperian Podcast #9 – Jeremy Shearmur – ‘Karl Popper, Friedrich Hayek and the Future of Liberalism’ The Popperian Podcast: The Popperian Podcast #9 – Jeremy Shearmur – ‘Karl Popper, Friedrich Hayek and the Future of Liberalism’ (libsyn.com)