Nordic Ideology

by Hanzi Freinacht

  Most people aren’t responding to this, to the sheer quantitative immen­sity of the task and its rising stakes. They don’t care, they don’t under­stand, they don’t inform themselves because they’re not incentivized to; they don’t pol­itically support serious decisive action and they don’t adjust their life­styles. Many people I talk to really don’t worry about it. Travel by flight is boom­ing glob­ally, as is meat consumption. None of the political parties, inclu­ding the Greens, are advan­cing anywhere near the necessary meas­ures. The media talk about trivialities such as making “conscious choices” and not throwing away good food. This amounts to just another splash of piss in the Mississ­ippi.

  That, my suspicious friend, is cata­stro­phically unscientific behav­ior—and it’s not a few hillbillies on the red hills of Georgia. It’s the establish­ment; most people you will meet. It is an indication, if any­thing, that we live in an un­scientific society—leading lives far, far removed from empiri­cal science. It is, frankly, an appalling state of affairs.

  And yet, science itself doesn’t point us towards appealing to human ration­ality as the best means for transitioning to sustainability. Within dis­cip­lines such as environmental psychology and behavioral economics, it is becoming abundantly clear that emotional and personal development evolves our values, habits and goals in terms of sustainability. Consequ­ently, science itself seems to point us beyond “rationality”, and towards a meta-­rationality that includes our emotions, relations and narratives. A scien­tific society would not only change our minds, but also our hearts. [110]

  Breathe it in. We are far, far, far away from a truly scientific society. We are medieval.

  The Ten-Fold Path to Enlightenment (2.0)

  So much for the Enlightenment and its modern project. In short, we must “truth” society. It must be properly truthed. It needs a good and thorough truthing. I give you… the ten-fold path to enlightenment! Enlightenment 2.0, that is.

  As with so many other things this is not a bin­ary matter, a matter of either-or, but a developmental matter, a matter of soci­ety advancing to higher stages of empiricism and critical self-scru­tiny. The radicality of this process lies not so much in the general idea that polices should be “evi­dence-based”, but in the thrust to make it an ongoing politi­cal pro­ject to make society more scientific in a wide and pervasive sense.

  Here and there, proto versions of Empirical Politics are cropping up. In 2018, the French president Emmanuel Macron annou­nced that his coun­­­try will combat “fake news”. This, of course, begs the quest­ion about who knows the truth, and who gets to say what’s fake, and how fake it has to be? His taken path is much too linear, much too naive and bound to pro­duce self-contradictions and censorship, perhaps in the hands of less libe­ral pow­ers. Clearly, he does not see that truth­­ing society is a long-term non-linear process. You can’t just “press the truth button”. Like I said, Em­pirical Pol­itics is not obvious, not even to the prodigies of progressive Euro­pean pol­itics. And in cases like Macron’s, it does get naive.

  What, then, are the major areas of Empirical Politics? What exactly would our Ministry of Empirical Politics —or maybe just the Ministry of Sci­ence or something similar (Orwell’s 1984 had a “Ministry of Truth”)—be up to? I’d like to mention ten categories of things to do. We won’t dis­cuss them in detail because expanding them is itself part of the political process, and because there’s ten of them. The ten-fold path.

  Numero uno : The Ministry of Empirical Politics would evaluate, sur­vey, rate and publicize the degree of evidence-based practice in all areas of pub­lic sector work and civil service. This would include every­thing from edu­cation to healthcare to social work to policing and forensic practices to envir­­on­mental protection to all of the other forms of politics that we have mentioned thus far. What can be shown to function in a replicable man­ner, and what cannot? How can big data be accumulated and analyzed in each of these cases? In which areas are we driving in the dark? Together with people on all levels of society, the ministry should also be charged with mak­ing plans for how to improve the empirical rigid­ity of what is going on. Step by step, all public activities should become more know­ledge-driven and well-infor­med—meaning they should be intersubjecti­vely scrutinized, again and aga­in.

  Number two: Empirical Politics would aim to improve the quality, rel­evance and reliability of science, throughout all branches. It is an uncon­tro­versial fact that univer­sities and other institutions generally function far from optimally. Society as a whole has a lot of science out there, and this entity, viewed as a massive entirety of enough frontiers to explode any human brain, can of course be more or less efficient, well-coordinated and in line with human needs and goals. It’s not just a question of how much funding science gets; it’s a question of what level of quality science—this most crucial of society’s projects—has. There is a lot of low-quality res­earch that is just too sloppily made, made for show, never re­prod­uced or double-checked, and simply never read by anyone. And there is so much stuff which needs to be done but never is, “because we don’t have the res­ources”. Science and research of course require a good amount of auto­nomy to function: Naturally, we want evidence-based policy, not poli­cy-based evidence! But even that is a question of Empirical Politics: If we want a society informed by the best possible knowledge, how do we make certain that such knowledge is produced autonomously and reliably?

  Number three: a cultivation and development of the critical meta-dis­cussion about science and its role in society. Basically, if we are to have a society where things are always evaluated against the benchmarks set by scientific inquiry, we should better make certain that science as a whole and our “politics of science” are properly critiqued from as many and sys­te­matic angles as poss­ible. This is where activities such as the philosophy of science, the soc­io­logy of knowledge (and of science, and of philosophy), applied cognitive science and the discipline that is sometimes called “soci­al episte­mology” (pioneered by Steven Fuller) are granted plenty of res­our­ces and a central role in society. This concerns such things as seeing which trends and norms are dominating within the scien­ces—and why—and how this spills over into society at large; or how politics and econo­mic interests may be undermining the autonomy and validity of science; or how certain sciences unduly get more resources and attention than others; or how certain research programs may be built on shaky pre­mises in the first place; or how certain ethical codes are not being observ­ed… You get the picture. There’s really no limit to how deep you can go on this one. Under the umbrella of all projects we think of as “sciences” (and huma­nities) there is just so much crazy and unfair and irrational tunnel vision stuff going on that we must make certain there is a proper crit­ical discuss­ion about science-in-society. Science is not a straightforward affair, some­thing “obvi­ous” that you can “just do” and then “get know­ledge”. It never was and never will be. New questions always arise: what is worth knowing, why, and how highly should it be prioritized, and by what processes should we decide, and how should the research be organized… Tough questions.

  Bruno Latour, the philosopher and anthropo­lo­gist who wrote Labora­tory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts in 1979 (with Steve Woolgar) pion­eered the practice of studying the everyday life of scientists and their research tools and environments; today Latour’s tradition is called “Actor-Network Th­eo­ry”: scientists whose specialty is to study scientists. People like to joke—some­times scorn­fully—that then there are scientists who write about scientists who study scientists, and scientists who write about scientists-scientists-scientists, and so on. But yes, that’s pretty much the direction society must take: a peer-reviewed society. It’s no joke. Society must be sci­entific, and science itself, viewed soberly as a part of society, must also be under con­stant critical siege from a rich multiplicity of inter­secting per­spec­tives. Science isn’t too sacred to b
e scrutinized: It becomes sacred thr­ough scrutiny. An intell­igent Empirical Politics would fund and cultivate such a process of the sociology of know­ledge throughout society.

  Number four: We should increase the number of networked contacts and exchanges between the scientific fields—there’s that magic word inter­disciplinarity (or crossdisciplinarity)—as well as between the sciences and the industries, both private companies, social entrepreneurs, the pub­lic sec­tor and other agents. You may recognize this line of thinking in eco­n­omic geography, where people study things like innovation clusters, triple-helix models (the synergy of university, business and city admini­stration) and incubators for high-tech industries. The point is that if an economy spec­ializes within some branches of science in the global know­ledge economy, say solar power or nanotech, it should also try to create pathways to putting this knowledge into the right contexts and uses. Science is one thing, scien­ce-in-society is another; it’s the rich ecosystem that feeds upon the juices of discovery and in turn creates fertile soil for further research. Not only should science be improved upon and opti­mized, so should science-in-society. These knowledge ecosystems should be improved upon, and that requires smart Empirical Politics.

  Number five: increasing the average ability for critical thinking and logi­cal reasoning in the general population. There are, natur­ally, many ways of doing this. One way is standardized tests in schools that include techni­ques of “fooling” the minds of students, so that they must be con­fronted with how they bought into an illusion, an apparent surface pheno­menon or a case of downright trickery. Creative projects that cultivate the public’s logical and critical thinking could be funded, e.g. by means of prize con­tests and so forth. Coaches in logic and critical thinking could be educated and be em­ployed as teachers or advisors within many fields. If more peo­ple iden­tify as crit­ically minded and “logical”, this will make such norms more pervas­ive—and hence quackery and false inferences will be more difficult to get away with within all fields of society. Not only should more peop­le be more apt at busting bullshit arguments—this being a skill we generally lack to a truly deplorable degree—but more of us should cultiva­te a deeper search for truth. This includes increased inner self-awareness; that we are trained, for in­stance, to catch our own minds making false im­plicit infer­ences (“this person is bad at playing the violin, so he’s probably a shallow person” and all other sorts of things we make false assumptions about).

  It has been shown that it is not enough to inform people of our own biases; we must be actively trained to catch ourselves before such biases curtail our reasoning. Our fundamental rel­atedness to reality as a myst­ery is one of the forms of inner personal depth that we discussed in Book One; and by finding ways to awaken this spark within more of us, we can bring into being a more pro­foundly truthful society.

  Let’s speed up.

  Number six: the founding of crosschecking media institutes. When Pre­sident Macron wants to combat disinformation and fake news, he is not entirely off mark. But the way to increase the reliability of the media and the general discourse long-term is through cross-referenced re­views of the qua­lity of reporting and journalism. Media outlets, journalists and writers should be checked for factuality, reasoning and presentation and be given rates and rankings. Low quality journalism should not receive public supp­ort. Again: a peer-reviewed society. How to do this in a depoli­ticized, fair and “objective” manner is a question of Empirical Politics. May the best suggestions win.

  Number seven : the support of a co-developmental political culture. We don’t want the sneakiest and most loudmouthed to rule us and gain power; we want the best possible common truths and solutions to emerge through the rich processes of competition, understanding and deliberati­on. So we need our political culture and debate to take on more civil and respectful forms. There is a tendency in all of us to admire the dashing, the confident, the winners of exchanges of clever retorts. But in an advan­ced and complex society, such competitions are little more than a signal inter­ference in the information-processing that makes up society’s self-organi­za­tion. We need to find ways to develop beyond it, to develop poli­tical culture itself; from snide remarks and sly competition, to earnest co-dev­elop­ment. I’m not saying it’s easy, I’m say­ing do it or die trying.

  Number eight: We could support the development of popular culture in an empirically correct direction. Whereas the arts must always remain free, it should be noted that blockbuster movies and popular outlets play a crucial role in forming people’s background understanding of reality. If physics and history are presented with glaring faults in movies and books, this certainly affects the overall level of realism that can be expected from the public. Efforts could be made to support the proli­feration of more fac­tually correct stories. If people are soaked in prepos­terous movies 24/7, should we be so shocked that many don’t react when leading politicians deny climate change?

  Nine: the development of the precision and reliability of everyday lan­guage. Since so much of our lived and shared reality is mediated through language, many of our political problems, conflicts and misunderstand­ings stem from linguistic imprecisions and the vagueness of words. It could be a long-term project to make language more coherent, exhaustive and pre­cise. It’s one of those things that’s almost impossible to measure, but the impact of which must undeniably be vast.

  Ten . Phew. This one links back to Existential Politics: support of the “ontological security” of the population. Ontological security is a term coi­n­ed by the sociologist Anthony Giddens, and usually refers to “the sense of order and continuity in regard to an individual’s experience”. The point here is, as noted earlier, that our commitment to truth and our abili­ty to challenge our own opinions and conceptions depend upon how safe we all fundamentally feel in the universe. By strengthening this sense of sec­urity, we serve truth-in-society at its most essential level.

  —

  Ten things, my suspicious friend. Feel free to add more, or to exchange this list for a better one. But the issue remains: We need to find ways to be better at sticking to empirically sound assessments of reality.

  Ice-cream does not make mach­inery work better, not even computers, I am not Napoleon, vaccines don’t cause autism, climate change is not a hoax. If we’re wrong about these things and if we make the wrong predic­tions, we pay an enormous price. It’s that fundamental. All things tend to work poorly with­out good predictive models of reality. And yet we are always at some distance from knowing any number of very relevant, life-changing truths.

  But you’re getting the drift, aren’t you? The point is that if you do these ten things in a smart and organized manner, and you coordinate all of them with each other, and you love them long-time, you will wake up one morning to a more truthful society. And I hope I’ve shown you that this isn’t an “obvious” thing that “we’re already doing”. It isn’t and we’re not.

  We really need to kill off all the excuses our lazy minds can come up with for not being scientific and committed to truth. I am not proposing scien­tism or crude reductionism; I’m talk­ing about finding the best pos­sible explanations and solutions and using them in all parts of society. There isn’t a place in the world, not even within the arts, psychedelic trips or spirit­uality, where the truth has no relevance.

  In metamodern society, “truth is God” (Gandhi said it). The point is not to obsess about “hard, rational empiricism!” with those strict eye­brows of a narrow-minded modernist, or to reduce the richness of life and exist­ence to hard, crunchy data and chew it like a jawbreaker until the end of days. To the conventional moder­nist mind, truth is binary: To them, there is “the real world” and then there’s the cheap copout fluff of weaker and dumber spirits. This stance is sometimes called “scientism”, some­times “naive real­ism”.

  That’s not what metamodern Empiri­cal Poli­tics is about. The point is to gradually increase society’s
capacity for info­rm­ation processing and event prediction by developing our collective capacity for intersubject­ive cross­­check­­ing . This must happen at all levels of society.

  Although we must all bow before the dazzling elegance of science, it doesn’t offer us a safe “ground of reality”, just a strange space that tun­nels in all directions. Yet, in this magnificent and frightening hall of mir­rors we must still latch on to the best models of reality, and we must still res­pect the authority of science, but only if it can be questioned by yet more universal authorities of science creation.

  Empirical Politics is the cult­iv­a­tion of our shared commit­ment to an honest exploration of the mysteries of reality. Imagine waking up in a world truly committed to science on a new and higher level.

  And what a wonderful world that would be.

  Chapter 17:

  POLITICS OF THEORY