In conversation with Oseni Taiwo Afisi
He fled as an aged and battled 35 year old. A man between worlds, with a thin and eclectic resume. Karl Popper had tried his hand at teaching, at psychology (of sorts), and even at carpentry, completing an apprenticeship as a cabinet-maker. He had a relatively-new doctorate of philosophy from the University of Vienna hanging on his wall, and a young wife, Hennie, to support. He was also Jewish!
1930’s Vienna was one of those extraordinary places and times to be alive. The cultural centre of Europe and rich in cosmopolitan politics, artists, writers, actors, musicians, and public intellectuals all rushed in for a taste; desperate to somehow squeeze-in, to be a part of that indescribable moment, in whatever small way they could.
Popper grew up in the heart of this. His father, Simon, was a lawyer who wrote satirical plays in his spare time, as well as building a formidable personal library of over ten thousand books where he would add his own German translations of Greek and Roman classics. The family were bourgeois, comfortable, and deeply integrated into the vibrant circus around them.
The young Karl Popper had a lot to be thankful for: he was too young to have served and suffered in the trenches of the First World War, and sure he had lived through the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, but from its ashes came a rare type of cultural re-birth, and an intellectual revolution whose impact ran for generations. The peak of this was that collection of scientists and philosophers and logicians and mathematicians who called themselves the Vienna Circle.
The members of the Circle ran as a who’s who inter-war intellectual life: Moritz Schlick, Hans Hahn, Philipp Frank, Otto Neurath, Olga Hahn-Neurath, Rudolf Carnap, Herbert Feigl, Richard von Mises, Karl Menger, Kurt Godel, Friedrich Waismann, Felix Kaufmann, Viktor Kraft, Edgar Zilsel… And the work they discussed each week belonged to a similarly impressive showcase of names: Ernst Mach, David Hilbert, Henri Poincare, Pierre Duhem, Gottlob Frege, Bertrand Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Albert Einstein…
A little late to the game and much too fresh-faced, Popper sat on the periphery of the Circle, never a participant in any of the meetings. But he did build friendships with those on the inside – the first was Otto Neurath whom he bumped into on the grounds of the University of Vienna. And it was Neurath who would later give Popper the title that he would wear as a badge of honour for the rest of his life: “the official opposition”.
The opposition to the philosophical blinders that he saw upon the Circle, the inferiority of the people within it, the glorification of idols such as Plato, Hegel, Marx, Freud and Wittgenstein, and particularly the opposition to the terrible ideas that they founded and publicised to the world, of which logical positivism was the worst offender. Even then Popper had a keen eye for the long-term dangers of bad ideas. He saw those beautiful Viennese streets a little differently:
I certainly disliked the existing society in Austria, in which there were hunger, poverty, unemployment, and runaway inflation—and currency speculators who managed to profit from it. But I felt worried about [Communism’s] obvious intention to arouse in its followers what seemed to me murderous instincts against the class enemy. I was told this was necessary, and in any case not meant quite so seriously, and that in a revolution only victory was important, since more workers were killed every day under capitalism than would be killed during the whole revolution. I grudgingly accepted that, but I felt I was paying heavily in terms of moral decency.
There was also another social and political movement flooding those cobblestones with the promises of revolution and utopia. Each day more and more young men were gathering, holding rallies, marching in strict unison, and singing a new type of patriotic song. In the early moments of this, out for his evening stroll, Popper was stopped by a uniformed teenager holding a large pistol. Popper tried to reason with the boy, who wasn’t there to rob him, but rather to police him, to ensure that he wasn’t up to no good. The young lad looked back at Popper with indifference and said, “What, you want to argue? I don’t argue, I shoot.” On his shoulder was a newly-sewn Swastika.
Shaken and scared, Popper shut his mouth and walked quickly home. That night, alone in his study, the first seeds of The Open Society and its Enemies were conceived.
A rich and pervasive anti-Semitism meant that Vienna at the time boasted the highest conversion rate of Jews to Christianity in Europe. New possibilities were opened for converted Jews: they were allowed to marry non-Jews, were eligible for new promotions and professional opportunities, and could live largely unmolested lives. Like many of those around them, the Popper family followed suit and assimilated their religion and their culture.
This was done so seamlessly that, while growing up, the only real involvement that Karl had with Jewish culture was from the outside looking in, as an intellectual analysis. Despite this, Jews still made up about ten percent of the city’s population. Then came Nuremberg and the Nuremberg Laws. Hitler was ramping up his race war, tracing the bloodlines of his enemies, and squeezing Jewish life and culture to impossible limits. The panic for assimilation was on!
And it was all horribly misplaced. When the Anschluss happened on March 12th, 1938, things tilted beyond hope. German forces walked into Austria to rapturous applause, and the two countries fused together into a single Nazi state. Those inter-marriages were annulled, Jews were fired from their jobs and arrested on the streets; no claims to previous religious conversion would save anyone. Karl Popper had got out just in time… eighteen of his relatives who stayed behind died in the Holocaust.
Stateless and desperate, Popper twice applied for British citizenship, and was twice rejected because he failed the residency requirements. So he leaned as much as he could on a distant but admiring colleague, Bertrand Russell, whom he had met at a philosophy conference in France in 1935. As formulaic and unimpressive as the letter sounded, this was still a recommendation from Russell, and so worth its weight in gold:
“Dr Karl Popper is a man of great ability, whom any university would be fortunate in having on its staff.”… “I learn that he is a candidate for a post at Canterbury University College, Christchurch, New Zealand, and I have no hesitation in warmly recommending him.”
Classified only as a “friendly alien”, Popper was still without a permanent home, and without a citizenship to fall back on. But he was alive and he had a job, as well as relatively safe harbour for the rest of the war years. Looking back on the carnage unfolding in Europe, Popper felt motivated to begin his own “war effort”. In his own words, New Zealand was “infinitely remote”, “not quite the moon, but after the moon… the farthest place in the world.” Here – three months away from Europe by mail, five weeks away by ocean travel, and beyond the reach of direct air routes – The Open Society and Its Enemies began to take shape.
Popper looked back on his time in New Zealand with a rare and sentimental fondness:
There was no harm in the people: like the British they were decent, friendly, and well disposed… I had the impression that New Zealand was the best-governed country in the world, and the most easily governed… I liked New Zealand very much… and I was ready to stay there for good.
For his wife Hennie, not so much! For her these were “the nightmare years”. Her husband’s meagre salary wasn’t really the issue, nor was it the need for her to grow backyard vegetables just to get by. The problem was the steadily rising manuscript before them, and her full-time job as both typist and editor. Karl would routinely pass his handwritten drafts to her, and she would retype the same pages as before, with increasingly minor changes added in the margins. By the time it was finished, she had run this task nearly twenty different times; for a book that sits close to a thousand pages.
From epistemology and the Vienna Circle, Popper was now stretching his title of “official opposition” in new ways. He was thinking back to those movements that were rampaging across his former home and pushing his family into gas chambers, as well as newly encountered oppressive societies such as the native Maoris in New Zealand. Popper was trying to tear down the fabric of Western political tradition, while exposing what lay at the heart of all despotism, all repression, all totalitarianism.
The Circle, Popper showed, had lost their way by trying to find certainty in science. It was a simple, innocuous, even intuitive sounding mistake, but one that flowed quickly downstream with disproportionate momentum and harm. Now he was warning against other commonly-held ideas which had the same dangerous reach, such as historicism (the notion that history is determined by certain laws, and so the future can be accurately predicted by understanding those laws), and even banal sounding truisms such as politics is about electing the best leaders and policies.
It was just this however – seeking the best leaders and the best policies – that led Plato away from democracy (where the uninformed and easily influenced rabble were in charge) and into an intellectual dictatorship, run in perpetuity by The Best. It also allowed the Caesars to rule over Rome through strength and violence, it gave Constantine and those after him the religious legitimacy to stay in power, it was the reference point for every monarch and aristocrat to further silence the unhappy masses, it was why Karl Marx decided against elections altogether…
The Open Society looked different, and for some, a lot less grand. The place for the great men of history shining a light for the ordinary people to follow, was gone. In their place, were those ordinary people, the unwashed and uninformed crowds making small, endless, and seemingly parochial choices about their lives, hoping to “minimise avoidable suffering.” Gone too were the utopias and the revolutions, replaced by something much less exciting: “piecemeal social engineering”. The Open Society was a world of ordinary people, making ordinary choices about their ordinary lives, embracing criticism and their own fallibility.
Stabbing at so many deeply held convictions and at so many still-revered thinkers, The Open Society and Its Enemies was nearly as difficult to publish as it was to write. In Popper’s own words: “it will be a colossal job for everybody concerned. It was a colossal job [writing it] here and I was (and am) very ill while doing it.”
To compound things, this was 1944 and the war was still raging, the manuscript was long and dense, and with his previous book not yet translated into English no one beyond a few small academic corners knew the name Karl Popper. Rejection after rejection flooded-in, and the publishing task was handed-over to an old friend back in England, Ernst Gombrich.
In the meantime, Karl and Hennie were falling out of love with New Zealand, and by 1945, almost as soon as the last gun in Europe fell silent, the Poppers were heading back to the continent. Another soon-to-be famous friend, Friedrich Hayek, had managed to pull a few strings at the London School of Economics, and despite a series of bureaucratic frustrations – “Our departure problems are appalling” – husband and wife were soon sailing towards a new job and the granting of naturalization and British citizenship.
In a letter to Gombrich, Karl Popper spoke about the journey before them:
Dear Ernst, This time we are really off, I think. We have been allotted berths—in two different four-berth cabins, though—on the M.V. “New Zealand Star.”… It is a frighter [sic], Blue Star Line, carrying normally 12 passengers, and at present (in the same cabins) 30. We are not terribly pleased to pay 320 pounds for the pleasure of spending 5 or 6 very rough weeks in the company of strangers… The passage will be very rough since we sail via Cape Horn—perhaps the roughest spot in the Seven Seas. Our corpses are expected to arrive, by the New Zealand Star, on January 8th or thereabouts. Please receive them kindly.
When they finally landed in England – seasick, miserable, dirty – and staggered gingerly to dry land, they were greeted by a beaming Gombrich, waving excitedly towards them. In his hand, high above his head, was the first edition of The Open Society and Its Enemies.
Popper settled in quickly to British life and a career at the London School of Economics, completing his exile where he always wanted to start it. And in his eyes, the exile really was still active. Alan Musgrave was Popper’s research assistant from 1963 to 1965, and said about Popper that, despite realising the magnitude and impact of his work, he remained “also very bitter” about his life. After the war, Popper was once asked if he would ever consider returning to those once vibrant streets of Vienna, to reminisce, and to see what had changed. He shot back bluntly, “No, never.”
Even the allure of a cushy, full-time professorship in Austria wouldn’t do it. It was a past that was better left where it was. When he did look back though on the horrors of that time, it was through the analytic lens of The Open Society, and that focus on the importance of every individual. The simple sounding error that the Nazis made, was collectivism. The same error (just different in magnitude) that was still being made across Africa, the Middle East, Asia, and by the Maoris on the sleepy shores of New Zealand. There were no benign cousins, no reasonable variants. Wherever this mistake happened the outcome would inexorably be terror and oppression.
The word that Karl Popper used to describe all such societies?
Tribal!
*** The Popperian Podcast #7 – Oseni Taiwo Afisi – ‘Karl Popper and Africa’ The Popperian Podcast: The Popperian Podcast #7 – Oseni Taiwo Afisi – ‘Karl Popper and Africa’ (libsyn.com)