Karl Popper and the fight against nonsense ideology. Part I
This is the first part of a four-part
essay applying the powerful critiques of Karl Popper to contemporary ideologies
which have gained significant social power – focusing in particular on Islamism and ideological forms of feminism (those forms which have become dominant in left-wing politics).
This first part engages with the way Popper
has been mistakenly appropriated by the free market right, and makes the case
that he should be adopted by the liberal-left, not least because he was liberal
and of the left.
“The future depends on ourselves, and we do not depend on any historical necessity. There are, however, influential social philosophies which hold the opposite view.”
~ Karl Popper
If guilt comes with association
then on the left you do not get much guiltier than receiving Margaret
Thatcher’s seal of approval.
This is the fate of Karl Popper; perhaps the best critic
of authoritarian and totalitarian ideologies there has been, yet somehow associated
with one of the most prominent ideologues of recent times as one of her own.
This is a great shame, for Popper’s appropriation by Mrs
Thatcher and some followers – many of whom show little sign of having read him –
acts as a natural deterrent to Popper’s natural constituency on the left, for
his sympathies were with the left - at least until the end of his life. Even during his stunning dismantling of
Marxist ideology in The Open Society and
its Enemies, Popper had fulsome praise for Karl Marx and echoed Marx’s
contempt for the apologists of capitalist exploitation in Victorian Britain.
The ignorance or shunning of Popper on the left is even
more of a shame because the critique of ideology he presents has great
relevance for current times. The era of authoritarian and totalitarian
government in Western societies may seem to be over, but the authoritarian
mindset remains very much with us. From market fundamentalism to Islamism, ethnic
nationalism, and ideological versions of feminism, we are confronted on all
sides by the same authoritarian arguments that Popper tore apart so well, but
in different guises and with different names.
Popper offers strong, straightforward and effective
arguments to undermine the thinking behind these doctrines. Indeed his critique
of fascism and Marxism transfers almost seamlessly to many contemporary
ideologies because they are directly influenced by the same theories. For the
left, Popper also offers a path cleared of the nonsense and evasions that pervade
current leftist discourse and prevent it from engaging effectively with
ordinary people.
But first we should address the myth that Popper was a
Thatcherite – since he is widely referred to by right-wing writers and
biographers as one of Mrs Thatcher’s favourite philosophers.
In her memoirs, Thatcher presents a crude self-serving
caricature of Popper’s views that serves her ideological argument rather better
than it does justice to him. Her latest biographer Charles Moore goes as far as
to bracket Popper as a ‘Conservative’
(with a capital ‘C’) and a free marketeer, which is doubly, startlingly, wrong.
Hugo Young in his biography of Thatcher described Popper
(before his death) as “perhaps the
greatest living conservative thinker”, showing the extent to which he has
been misunderstood and misrepresented on the wider left as well as on the right.
The Financial Times columnist Samuel Brittan got a bit closer in reflecting on Thatcher’s death, describing
Popper as a “classical
liberal”.
Moore, Young and Brittan all miss the
point that Popper was primarily a philosopher of science, who was most
interested in scientific questions. His socio-political writings were powerful
largely because they employed his thoughts on science to criticise theories of people
and society which claimed scientific backing – like Marxism and the nationalist
and racist ideologies that culminated in Nazism.
In his intellectual autobiography, Unended Quest, Popper describes how he was
himself a Marxist in his late teens – until he witnessed the brutal suppression
of a demonstration in Vienna that had been whipped up by communists. This made
him question an ideology that saw the killing of innocent people as a necessary
sacrifice for a greater good to come.
In his most famous work, The Open Society and Its Enemies, Popper
constantly professes his admiration for Karl Marx, calling him “one of the great liberators of mankind” and Das Kapital “a truly imperishable document of human suffering”.
He adds that Marx’s interpretation of the Victorian era appears
to fit only too well:
“a period of the most shameless and cruel exploitation. And this shameless exploitation was cynically defended by hypocritical apologists who appealed to the principle of human freedom, to the right of man to determine his own fate, and to enter into any contract he considers favourable to his interests.”
He was wary about the
dangers of state power, but unequivocal about the perils of free markets:
the principle of non-intervention, of an unrestrained economic system, has to be given up; if we wish freedom to be safeguarded, then we must demand that the policy of unlimited economic freedom be replaced by the planned economic intervention of the state. We must demand that unrestrained capitalism give way to an economic interventionism. And this is precisely what has happened.”
It goes without saying
that this is not the philosophy of a Conservative, a Thatcherite, or a free
marketeer. Popper’s critique of Marx and Marxism was rather based
on their claims to scientific prediction, or ‘prophecy’.
As he says in The
Open Society:
“In spite of his merits, Marx was, I believe, a false prophet. He was a prophet of the course of history, and his prophecies did not come true; but this is not my main accusation. It is much more important that he misled scores of intelligent people into believing that historical prophecy is the scientific way of approaching social problems. Marx is responsible for the devastating influence of the historicist method of thought within the ranks of those who wish to advance the cause of the open society.”
[End of Part I]
Part II, now up,
explores the ‘false prophecies’ of Marx and Hegel and how their theories
sacrificed the importance of individual ethical behaviour at the altar of
progress. Following articles look at how Islamism and dominant forms of feminism
are grounded in these theories, and how they share many attributes with the
ideologies that caused so much antagonism and destruction in the 20th
Century.
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