1. Language and Reality
Reality is what is. Everything else is an abstraction, construction or projection, which are all products of our own minds. For this is the way our minds work. We observe reality and think we recognise certain abstract patterns within it. We then construct theories, stories or narratives to explain these patterns which we then project back onto reality. This means that we subsequently perceive reality through these projections, which, while sometimes being very helpful, no doubt contributing significantly to our success as a species, can also cause us problems. For the way we perceive reality naturally effects our behaviour, which other people observe without necessarily understanding the theoretical or narrative construct which has informed our perception and hence determined that behaviour, which they may consequently see as odd or even unhinged. As a result, they may conclude that we are in some sense mentally defective or even mentally ill.
At the time of writing, for instance, many people have observed Donald Trump’s erratic behaviour over the last few months and concluded that he is either suffering from dementia or some form of mental illness. I, on the other hand, am not so sure. For given the narrative about Iran he had either constructed for himself or more likely been fed, his incomprehension and probable frustration at the failure of the Iranian people to rise up and remove a tyrannical and oppressive regime after the assassination of its leader were entirely predictable. Of course, at that point, a wiser man might have looked more closely at the reality of Iran and questioned whether the narrative he had constructed or been given was correct. A truly wise man might even have questioned his entire decision making process and resolved to address all issues with a little more care and attention in future. Not only would this have meant admitting a mistake, however, but it would have undermined his entire view of himself as an astute and skilful deal maker. So he doubled down on his original strategy and further intensified the military campaign, having been told that the US military was the greatest military in the world and could bring any regime to its knees. When this failed and the greatest military in the world actually began running out of munitions, he was therefore left with an insoluble problem from which he could not extricate himself without suffering a catastrophic humiliation. His earlier incomprehension and frustration therefore turned quite naturally into annoyance and even anger, both at the Iranians for not giving in and at those around him for failing to do what they said they could do and leaving him with no good options. The fact that he then seemed to change his mind about what to do next on an almost hourly basis was not therefore symptomatic of a mind in melt down but of one behaving in an entirely normal and predictable way.
That we do not see this is because we make the same mistake about the human mind that Donald Trump and those around him made about Iran. In order to explain Iran’s antagonism towards the West in general and the USA in particular, they constructed a narrative in which a theocratic and dictatorial regime was ideologically opposed to freedom and democracy, which is how they genuinely perceived Iran’s government as being. Similarly, in diagnosing Donald Trump’s erratic behaviour, his opponents didn’t so much construct as adopt a pre-existing theory about mental illness through which they then then perceived all his actions. The problem with this, however, is that calling someone a ‘delusional narcissist’, as I have heard Donald Trump described on a number of occasions in recent weeks, doesn’t actually explain anything unless one unpacks the entire psychological theory behind it and agrees with that theory.
We, however, do not even get that far. For instead of thinking of ‘delusional narcissism’ as a term which only has meaning within a theoretical construct created to explain a pattern of behaviour we have observed, we actually think that it is something ‘real’. That is to say that we fail to make this fundamental distinction between reality on the one hand and a theoretical or narrative construct on the other, which rather raises the question as to how otherwise seemingly intelligent people can so consistently make this mistake.
Part of the answer, of course, is that most of us don’t really understand the relationship between reality and language at all, don’t have the linguistic resources necessary to distinguish between reality and a theoretical construct and do not realise that all natural languages, such as English, contain sublanguages, such as the language of psychology, for instance, which are more or less self-contained, with the result that, as long as they are internally consistent and do not flatly contradict what we observe, it is impossible to tell whether or not they actually correspond to reality.
In fact, so little is understood about this issue that very few people have ever even addressed it. Two of those who have are the French philosopher Michel Foucault, who, in ‘The Order of Things’, characterised these self-contained pockets of language as ‘discursive formations’, and the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, who, in his ‘Philosophical Investigations’, drew an analogy between what he called ‘language games’ and games like chess, which is especially helpful in that chess, itself, can be thought of simply as a language. After all, it has both its own semantic objects and syntax, the semantic objects being the six different types of piece and the eight by eight board on which they move, the syntax being the rules by which they move. It even has its own standard notation, which is used to record individual games but which can also be used to play the game itself. Without a physical representation, using only the standard notation to play a game makes it very difficult to visualise the state of the game at any one point, but it is not impossible.
Thus, one can say that chess is essentially just a language. The main supposed difference between the language of chess and other discursive formations, such as the language of psychology, is that the language of chess does not refer to anything beyond itself – it is entirely self-contained – whereas we assume that the language of psychology refers to real things, i.e. people, in the real world. But is this assumption always correct?
To obtain a clearer understanding of just how epistemologically shattering this question is, consider, for instance, the language of particle physics, which, like the language of chess has its own semantic objects, which include six types of quark, and its own syntax, which defines how each type of quark behaves. As in the case of standard chess notation, one can thus compose sentences about quarks which are syntactically or grammatically correct and make sense to those who understand the subject, and sentences which are syntactically or grammatically incorrect and are total nonsense. Even when a sentence about quarks is grammatically correct, however, one can still ask whether quarks are real or just theoretical constructs within an internally consistent discursive formation.
Of course, particle physicists and, indeed, most scientists will be utterly outraged by the suggestion that quarks are not real. For if one has spent one’s entire career working in a field of science in which someone now suggests that the objects of one’s study are merely theoretical constructs invented to explain a particular aspect of the universe, one is likely to feel somewhat miffed. In fact, most people would simply refuse to accept that this was the case. For more than three hundred years, however, up until the late 18th century, in fact, nearly all scientists believed that all matter contained something called phlogiston, which most substances gave off when they were heated, thereby accounting for their loss of weight. In fact, the history of science is littered with examples of similar theories which have since been abandoned. For this is the nature of the relationship between language and reality. We continually invent new language games or discursive informations to explain reality, which reality continually shows us are wrong.
The question you are probably asking, however, is what this has to do with political realism. The way in which this kind of discursive formation relates to reality, however, does not just apply to science; it applies to everything. In fact, the world of science is probably the least problematic domain in which this relationship holds. For the world of particle physics is as self-contained as the language in which particle physicists talk to each other. As a result, it doesn’t affect the rest of us, for whom it doesn’t really matter whether quarks are real or not. In geopolitics, however, the adoption of a false narrative or theory about the nature of a foreign government can be disastrous, as we have seen in the case of Iran.
This then raises the question as to why we never seem to learn from this almost habitual mistake. For while it is all well and good to say that, ultimately, it is because we do not understand the relationship between language and reality, when the consequences of this lack of understanding are so serious, one would have thought that we would have taken the time to investigate the problem more closely. The answer, however, almost certainly lies in a number of rather unattractive human character traits, the first of which is the pride we take in status.
2. Status, Power and Pretence
As stated earlier, theoretical terms only have meaning as part a theory as a whole. In modern as opposed to classical usage, the term ‘narcissist’, for instance, only has meaning within the theory that deals with Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD), which can manifest itself in many different ways and can have many different causes. Understanding NPD thus involves first learning how recognise or diagnose it and then how to track its aetiology. More than anything else, however, it means learning a substantial part if not all of the language of psychology, which, in Britain, can take up to seven years of formal education: three years for a Bachelor’s degree, one year for a Master’s and three more years for a Ph.D. It is hardly any wonder, therefore, that people who have spent all this time and effort learning this language like to use it, even when it’s not necessary.
I say this because in the paragraph above in which I described how Donald Trump very probably got himself into his current predicament with respect to Iran, I didn’t use a single ‘psychological’ term. I did use terms like ‘incomprehension’, ‘frustration’, ‘annoyance’ and ‘anger’, but these terms are closer to being observational than theoretical. That is to say that the behaviour through which these emotions are expressed is so closely associated with the emotions themselves that one cannot really separate the two. More to the point, I felt that my description of how Donald Trump very probably got himself into this mess made perfect sense without further theoretical explanation.
In contrast, I recently watched a discussion between Professor Jeffrey Sachs and two psychologists, who used I whole plethora of psychological terms to explain Donald Trump’s current mental condition, most of which I do not remember because they held very little meaning for me and, in my view, did more to obfuscate the subject of the discussion than illuminate it. For given that we cannot fully understand theoretical terms without – to some extent – understanding the theory behind them, and given that most of us don’t understand clinical psychology to any great extent at all, all most people will have taken away from this discussion is the impression that the three participants seemed to know what they were talking about and that, if they thought that Donald Trump was suffering from one of the many possible mental illnesses they discussed, then the chances are that he actually is mentally ill.
Indeed, this was almost certainly the conclusion that the three participants wanted their audience to draw. For the discussion, of course, was not primarily about clinical psychology at all but politics, the aim being to convince the audience that Donald Trump is unfit for office and should therefore be removed. The way it achieved this aim, however, was also one of its principal objectives. For by showcasing the participants’ erudition while making the audience aware of their own lack of knowledge on this subject, it conferred on the participants a certain status, giving them the power not just to play a part in removing a President of the United States but in influencing society in general. And it is for this reason, of course, that they each spent seven years in formal education, learning a language which they have probably spent even more years teaching, gaining acolytes and disciples, through whom they have exercised even more power and influence. What’s more, it is precisely why their students have followed them on this journey: not to increase the sum of all knowledge or pass on that knowledge to others, but because they have witnessed the status their professors enjoy and want to share in the power and influence they consequently wield.
Not, of course, that anyone who has ever played this game has ever thought of it in this way. For one of the conditions of being allowed to play the game at all is that one actually believe in the academic or scientific discipline in which one is being trained, which further entails that one cannot think of that discipline as a discursive formation or language game in which the objects are merely theoretical constructs. In fact, anyone who questions the reality of the objects which populate their chosen discursive formation will be branded a heretic and expelled from the society which speaks this particular language. The status, power and influence one gains by knowing one’s way around a particular discursive formation thus actually prohibits one from looking too closely into the relationship between language and reality.
What is even more depressing, however, is the way in which those who aspire to join the inner circle of a particular discipline pretend to be able to speak its language even before they can. Having taught in a university, myself, I have seen it many times: students who throw around technical terms with no idea what they are actually saying or talking about. Indeed, I’m fairly sure I did it myself. The problem is that many people never get beyond this shallow pretence, partly because they never discover a metalanguage that would enable them to escape the discursive formation in which they have been trapped, but also, I think, because they lack the moral and emotional strength to recognise the sterility of their incarceration. So they go on writing variations on the same empty academic papers on which they have built their careers, not to communicate any new ideas to anyone but simply to add another publication to their CV.
It’s why between 3.3 million and 5.2 million academic papers are published globally every year, depending on what one includes in this category, most of which, according to the old joke, only ever get three readers: the authors, themselves, the editor of the publishing journal and the peer reviewer, who merely gives the paper a cursory glance in order to ensure that it is written in the right language and conforms to the current consensus. In fact, the reviewer doesn’t even have to check the author’s data, which, at best, will have been statistically manipulated to reach the required conclusion and, sometimes, may not actually exist at all. For why risk a carefully constructed and internally coherent narrative by chucking the spanner of real world data into the works?
Nor do I expect this situation to be improved by the introduction of AI. For what does AI do other than trawl the internet, reading and digesting papers before regurgitation them in a properly digested form, all inside a bubble of language which never actually touches reality. As a result, it is very possible that AI will be the final nail in the coffin of real scientific research.
And something similar is almost certainly happening in our system of government, which, throughout the West, has already reached a level of dysfunctionality that will surely result in failed states, very possibly starting with the United States, itself, where there must have been at least some people within its seventeen intelligence agencies who knew before the current war that, far from being ruled by a dictatorial and tyrannical regime, Iran is a highly democratic constitutional republic with robust institutions that would continue to function no matter how many of the country’s leaders were assassinated. Similarly, there must also have been some competent military analysts in the Pentagon who knew that Iran is a vast country with a mountainous terrain totally unsuited to conventional ground operations and that an air campaign would not be able to penetrate its numerous and well distributed underground military facilities. One can only assume, therefore, that when they submitted their reports to their superiors, they were universally told to ‘get with the program’ or get another job: a suspicion which would seem to be confirmed by the fact that more than twenty senior generals and admirals have been fired from the US military in the last twelve months, including Army Chief of Staff, Randy George, Navy Chief of Staff, John Harrison, and Air Force Chief of Staff, David Allvin, all of whom almost certainly questioned the wisdom of going to war with Iran.
The trouble with such a truly tyrannical approach to government, however, is that, if one gets rid of all one’s independent critical thinkers, sooner or later all one has left are the unquestioning inhabitants of the government’s group think, who filter all information being passed up the chain of command to ensure that it conforms with the administration’s current policy.
An even bigger problem with this selective approach to framing one’s world view, however, is that, eventually, reality reasserts itself, as it almost certainly will do in the case Iran. Nor is this eventual collision with reality confined to geopolitics. In fact, the consequences of projecting a faulty theoretical construct onto reality in domestic politics can be just as serious as underestimating a foreign adversary and starting a war one cannot win.
Consider, for instance, Modern Monetary Theory (MMT), which tells us that governments can stimulate demand by borrowing money to spend on government programmes which expand the economy and increases tax revenues, out of which the money can then be repaid. Governments throughout the western world love this theory because it means that they don’t have to make the hard and often unpopular decisions necessary to balance their budgets. There is also no shortage of economists who have developed computer models which prove that the theory works. The only problem is that, in reality, it doesn’t. It never has worked and never will. All it does is increase the money supply, drive up inflation and increase government debt, which in most western countries now stands at more than 100% of GDP and will soon trigger the biggest financial and economic crash in history.
While politicians use MMT to avoid facing political reality, MMT, of course, is not actually a political theory; it is an economic one. There are, however, actual political theories which are even more dangerous than MMT. This is because political theories are not constructs projected onto the world through which the world is then perceived. In fact, they seldom tell us anything about world at all, either as it is in reality or as it is perceived; they tell us how it ought to be and, by implication, how we should therefore change it to make it conform to this ideal. The problem is that this ideal is usually completely unrealistic.
3. Political Theories & Political Realism
This is because human beings and the societies they form are always more complicated and ‘messy’ than any political theory is capable of truly representing. This is not only because we human beings seldom behave in the essentially rational way most political theories think we do, it is also because the world in which we live constantly presents us with new problems and issues with which we need to deal, with the result that even when a theory makes sense and has a certain attraction it is such an oversimplification of life that this, in itself, puts it at odds with reality.
Take John Locke’s Classical Liberalism, or instance, which has two main principles. The first is that, as long as we are not hurting anyone else, we should be allowed to live the way we choose. This, however, is then modified or circumscribed by the fact that, in order to enjoy this freedom and not be beholden to anyone else, we must also take responsibility for ourselves, freedom and responsibility thereby constituting two sides of the same coin.
Personally, I have always admired both the simplicity and the coherence of Locke’s political philosophy and, as far as possible, I have always tried to adhere to it. I also think that his two main principles should be incorporated into any well thought out constitution, as in many case they have been. Locke, himself, helped write the constitution of Carolina, for instance, which, in turn, greatly influenced the Constitution of the USA. The fact is, however, that while, as an ideal, his principles are something to live up to, in reality they are completely unrealistic.
This is because we human beings are social animals and are constrained in the way we live by the societies of which we are a part. One cannot simply live in whatever way one likes if it offends one’s neighbours, for instance, or even makes them feel uncomfortable, not least because there may come a day when one needs them. For while taking responsibility for oneself is an admirable principle and one that should be adhered to as far as possible – not least so as not to be burden on our neighbours – all of us need help at some time, especially as we get older. Even more importantly, as social animals, we are sociable and enjoy chatting with our neighbours, having a drink with them and even sharing a meal, none of which is possible if we do not share common values, similar backgrounds and a common culture. While a certain amount of personal freedom to live one’s life the way one chooses is thus desirable, it therefore has to be balanced by the kind of restraint required to foster a harmonious and cohesive society.
The problem, however, is that it is more or less impossible to formulate a general principle specifying what this level of balance should be, which is at least partly determined by the size of the community in which one lives. Small, tight knit communities, for instance, tend to be inherently conservative. They have their own way of doing things and can be easily offended by anyone who does not conform to common practices and traditions. As such, they can even seem oppressive to anyone who wants to do things differently and whose overwhelming desire may be to get away and move to a large city where their sheer anonymity will give them the freedom to live their lives as they please.
Large cities, however, tend to have the opposite problem. For while they may afford people more personal liberty, they may well lack social cohesion, especially if their populations are drawn from diverse backgrounds and cultures. The result is often a form of ghettoization, in which different areas of the city become home to different communities which are often distrustful of each other, leading to social tensions and even violence. Alternatively, an unfragmented city, without distinct neighbourhoods, may be just too large and anonymous for newcomers to form adequate support networks, leading to loneliness and depression.
My point, however, is not that one of these problems is preferable to the other but that there is no one simple solution with respect to how a society should be organised. In fact, finding the right balance between personal freedom and social cohesion is often a dynamic process, in which, at one time or another, most societies throughout their history have made some dreadful choices, not least because they foolishly adopt some political theory which, for a while, seems to make sense but which ends up with millions of people being murdered in concentration camps. Even when, by happy accident, they do happen to find a perfect solution, in fact, they often then mess it up, often by trying so hard to preserve what they have that this, in itself, becomes oppressive.
Of course, it may be argued that this balancing of personal freedom and social cohesion is not what we think of as ‘politics’ today. But from the early 18th to the mid 20th century in Britain, when the two main political parties were the Conservatives, who favoured more traditional structures and ways of living, and the Liberals, who favoured more personal freedom, especially in economic life, this was precisely what politics was about. It was only when the industrial revolution led to more urbanisation and people lost the support structures on which they had depended in tradition rural environments that a new political movement called socialism began advocating that the network of family and neighbours on which people had previously depended be supplemented or even supplanted by the state.
What’s more the issue of social cohesion is still at the centre of politics today. For at some point during the last thirty years, without any reference to human nature and political reality, someone decided that in order to solve the problems associated with an ageing population and a falling birth rate, foreigners from different ethnic, cultural and religious backgrounds should be imported into Europe, creating precisely the kind of diverse and incohesive populations which lead to the social tensions and violence we now see in our inner cities. Of course, it is the conservative native populations, who want to preserve their traditional way of life, who are blamed for this and who are consequently called hard right extremists, fascists, and white supremacists. But anyone who visited a tight knit village community in the 18th or 19th century would have witnessed exactly the same reaction to an influx of outsiders. For this is the reality of human nature and anyone who ignores it will soon discover that reality does not treat fools kindly.
This is not, of course, a justification of xenophobia or a lack of charity. But, again, it is a matter of balance. When Jews from Spain arrived in Britain in the 16th century and Huguenots from France arrived here in the 17th century, their numbers were small, they integrated into British society fairly quickly and they were soon accepted. Official figures for current net immigration into Britain, however, stand at around 200,000 per year, which most people think is a massive underestimation. Instead of examining historical reality, however, which demonstrates unequivocally that social cohesion is invariably rooted in a common cultural identity, those in power have unaccountably adopted a clearly contradictory political ideology which both celebrates diversity while simultaneously claiming that everyone is the same and interchangeable.
Indeed, it is difficult to decide which projection of a faulty construct onto reality is the most egregious: Donald Trump’s acceptance of a narrative with regard to Iran which said that the Iranian regime was both thoroughly evil and easily defeated, or the British government’s delusional belief that multiculturalism could be a source of strength. In both cases, a whole lot of trouble could have been avoided simply by taking the time to look at the facts and form a judgement based on reality rather than theory, which is something I highly recommend.
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