Left-brained right wingers

When you can't resist your own imagination.

Kwasi Kwarteng, drunk, outside the Groucho club five years ago shouted out loud:

“Sterling falling? Who the fuck cares if sterling's falling? You'll be all right; I'll be all right. It's a revolution!”

Kate Maltby printed the story at the time, but without his name, which she has now confirmed. And to most people this looks like disgusting Etonian arrogance, which it is. But it is also an illustration of a particular habit of mind which leads smart people horribly astray. Iain McGilchrist would call it left-brain dominance: it is a preference for the map over the territory; for the representation over reality; for simple and elegant explanations over inconvenient facts.

You can generalise this kind of explanation until it covers all forms of intellectual error and explains away everyone who disagrees with you. I want to avoid that, and also to avoid talking as if this were a merely cognitive error, or merely an emotional one. I am interested in temperament here.

Over the weekend I came across two instances of this temperament, from opposite ends of the political spectrum. The first was Bret Weinstein, an evolutionary biologist who was at the centre of one of the first cases of “cancel culture” when he lost his job at a college in Washington State after he was accused — quite unfairly — of racism. I know him slightly, which is to say I once had lunch with him and his wife. He was, of course, deeply suspicious of anyone who worked for the Guardian: perhaps he failed to realise that it would have been career death to admit that I had had any social dealings with him.

Mostly I was interested in gossip about Bob Trivers, under whom both he and his wife Heather Heying had studied.

In any case, after their expulsion, with a payoff for life from the college in Washington State where they had taught, Bret and Heather set up as “Professors in Exile” and gravitated, I am sorry to say, toward the “Intellectual Dark Web”. So now he has a twitter account, where he fulminates against the woke. And on Friday he tweeted that

there must be *zero* functional platforms, universities, newsrooms, science journals, because even one stable exception would turn the tide. That’s why @elonmusk is being targeted … The reason the number is 0 is that any exception would win almost immediately. If there was a real newspaper, we’d all subscribe, an honest major platform, we’d all use it, a sane university, we’d all send our kids, a real science journal, we’d all … a functional newspaper would beat 1000 political rags. It’s a super species because its competitors are weak, protected from competition by power, which co-opts or kills all rivals in the crib. Ditto universities, science journals…

Apart from the conspiratorial tone, what struck me was the complete ignorance about the complicated role that almost any newspaper plays in different ecologies. To write about “a functional newspaper” is to make huge assumptions about the function of a newspaper, and who it functions for.

Most people, when they ask who a newspaper functions for, assume that the answer must be the proprietor, and what he wants is power. This is untrue for several reasons.

Almost all the papers in the USA are owned by corporations interested only in money, which does much to explain the collapse of local journalism there. But even power-driven newspapers — let’s say the Guardian in Britain — develop a keen interest in money when it looked like running out. In the print age you got money by selling readers to advertisers; online you get it increasingly by selling readers news they want to hear.

If there were any substantial number of readers interested in what Professor Weinstein considers news, they would pay for it. But it is absurd to suppose that this is what most potential readers are prepared to pay for. Since they cannot act on almost any of the information in the news, they have no pressing interest in its truth. They want to be entertained and to have their prejudices gratified. The comfortable might like a little affliction in their news, much as they like salt in their food. But they don’t want to drink undiluted brine.

I assume that the ideal Weinstein newspaper would provide accurate, unbiased, well-informed news and analysis of the important issues of the day. It would be something like the BBC’s self-image. This, also, is my preference. But the one thing we know for certain is that the “we” who’d “all subscribe” would be a tiny subsect of the most elect. The groupuscule would be, at most, the size of the readership for the FT. Even that admirable paper is kept afloat by the earnings of the Saturday magazine for people with more money than sense.

But all this kind of dreary, awkward detail is powerless against the pull of his imagination, and what he imagines is a world in which the algorithms of natural selection work unhindered by the grit and clog of contingent facts.

Similarly, though from the other end of politics, I found myself arguing at the weekend with an agreeable Australian millionaire.

The algorithm that had enchanted him was markets. He believed in vouchers for everything, and thought that the welfare state could be given a fresh lease of life if only markets could bring the most efficient providers forward for every niche. He had, he said, run two successful restaurant businesses, and in the restaurant business you flourished, or not, by the satisfaction of your customers.

This reminded me of a conversation I had about ten year ago with a man who was privatising the Swedish school system who had exactly the same conviction that he was going to do well for himself by doing good for his country.

Today’s millionaire was also sincerely convinced that parental choice would make schools better for every child, including those who the present system fails.

In vain did I point out that there is already parental choice in the English school system — it just operates through the housing market rather than directly through the choice of school. In any case, the point is that the demand for schools which will increase your children’s earning power and status must always outstrip the supply. Otherwise they could not supply the positional goods which are what parents really want for their children and for which the children themselves compete as well — in some schools even in the classroom as well as the playground¹ .

This competition for positional goods is in fact exactly the way the game has played out in Sweden, where the privatisation of the school system has led to increased social segregation.

There is nothing wrong in principle with a system where the state pays at the consumer level, rather than the provider level — which is what he was arguing for — but the resulting markets must be very carefully and strictly regulated, while the incentive to game them is is strong for everyone involved. Although it isn’t logically entailed, a retreat from state provision can also tend to demoralise the state, and render it less resistant to capture by special interests, as we can see in the USA today.

But these were mere details to this man. Just like Professor Weinstein, he was intoxicated by the beautiful simplicity of his algorithm. What worked for restaurants had to work for schools, for hospitals, and for elder care.

Iain McGilchrist would say this is all a product of the left brain’s dominance — of a preference for the map over the territory, for the representation over reality as it presents itself. I’m sure this is true on some anatomical level. But these aren’t just modes of cognition. They are matters of temperament, of how we approach the world, and of what we find beautiful as well as disturbing in it. They move the whole man, as Newman would have said — and it was in his old church in Littlemore that I was arguing at the weekend.

1. I write as the still proud winner of the Dragon School General Knowledge prize for 1968