Local democracy

Mary Beard writes about electing the head of a local police authority in her blog:
http://timesonline.typepad.com/dons_life/2012/10/who-shall-i-vote-for-a-police-and-crime-commisioner.html

I commented:

Democracy is a decision-making technique that works well when the decision-makers hold power and have a consensus on how to use it. So you get slave-holding democracy, feudal democracy, municipal/city-state democracy, etc, all working well until the hold on power is challenged and the consensus is shredded.
In the transition to a new power-sharing consensus power becomes the unvarnished exercise of force it always is in essence. We're living in a transitional epoch (capitalist to socialist ie non-capitalist  mode of production, a free universal association of working people) and none of the big historical events we live through can be assessed on the basis of formal democracy.
So we need to get real about the possibilities, limitations and risks of the vote as a problem-solving mechanism. Before any proposal is put to a vote for decision, it has to be devised and formulated by people with an interest in pushing it through. This process is real politics, and the conditions determining whose interests are served are what allow us to judge the adequacy of any claimed democracy. Good for slave-holders? Slave-holding democracy. Good for ruthless, murderous (think Bhopal, or Marikana for that matter) capitalists? Bourgeois democracy.
And it's the big picture that counts even in tiny local decision-making. If the arteries don't work, the capillaries clot up and gangrene ensues.
Sounds pretty much like gangrene setting in in the local organs of police power in Britain ;-)

Science, reason and bad philosophy

Aimee Whitcroft blogs about rational discussion, aka science, at  http://sciblogs.co.nz/misc-ience/2012/10/09/no-actually-everyone-is-not-entitled-to-their-opinion/  (includes a link to the original blog location) and argues that some opinions are better than others. She doesn't go too deeply into how better opinions are validated, however, so I added the following comment, which gave me the opportunity to quote an astonishingly refreshing passage from an article on quantum physics in last month's Scientific American on why quantum obscurantism is an ideological artefact of bad (bourgeois) philosophy:

The problem is that all formally incontrovertible proofs are based on axioms that can’t be formally proven. So you can argue till you’re blue in the face and never satisfy the ideological sceptic who demands absolute proof.

What it comes down to is a combination of material empirical demonstrations and serious debate of a principled kind. And more often than not debate will equal struggle or even war.

So all truth is fundamentally institutional, rooted in people organized in society.

Which means it has to be fought for and defended in institutional ways, ie using social pressures such as armed force (the queasy might prefer the euphemistic terms 'laws' or 'government').

The litmus test here is the understanding of 'serious'. A frivolous or deliberately obscurantist opponent can’t be talked out of a mistaken position. Rationality won’t bite. Jews, gypsies and socialists will be incinerated if the fascists aren’t removed from power by force.

So I hope Patrick Stokes adds a few words about institutional clout to his riff on "you’re entitled to what you can argue for".

Hegel was well aware of all this as he watched the French Revolution changing the institutional foundations of truth, and he grasped the nettle and accounted for this in his philosophy. The World Spirit and the Spirit of the Age went on to don new socialist personas soon afterwards, however, so 'serious' bourgeois philosophy stopped dead with Kant, ie turned into its opposite and became frivolous and obscurantist.

Which left serious (no quotes) science in bourgeois society groping around in Plato’s cave so to speak.

An article in Scientific American special issue September 2012 by David Deutsch and Artur Ekert (“Beyond the quantum horizon”) lays the blame for the fumbling confusion entangling the quantum field squarely on "bad philosophy".

I’ll leave you with the relevant chunk of the section "Beyond Bad Philosophy":

"Erwin Schrödinger, who discovered quantum theory’s defining equation, once warned a lecture audience that what he was about to say might be considered insane. He went on to explain that when his famous equation describes different histories of a particle, those are "not alternatives but all really happen simultaneously." Eminent scientists going off the rails is not unknown, but this 1933 Nobelist was merely making what should have been a modest claim: that the equation for which he had been awarded the prize was a true description of the facts. Schrödinger felt the need to be defensive not because he had interpreted his equation irrationally but precisely because he had not.

"How could such an apparently innocuous claim ever have been considered outlandish? It was because the majority of physicists had succumbed to bad philosophy: philosophical doctrines that actively hindered the acquisition of other knowledge. Philosophy and fundamental physics are so closely connected—despite numerous claims to the contrary from both fields—that when the philosophical mainstream took a steep nosedive during the first decades of the 20th century, it dragged parts of physics down with it.

"The culprits were doctrines such as logical positivism ('If it’s not verifiable by experiment, it’s meaningless'), instrumentalism ('If the predictions work, why worry about what brings them about?') and philosophical relativism ('Statements can’t be objectively true or false, only legitimized or delegitimized by a particular culture'). The damage was done by what they had in common: denial of realism, the commonsense philosophical position that the physical world exists and that the methods of science can glean knowledge about it.

"It was in that philosophical atmosphere that physicist Niels Bohr developed an influential interpretation of quantum theory that denied the possibility of speaking of phenomena as existing objectively. One was not permitted to ask what values physical variables had while not being observed (such as halfway through a quantum computation). Physicists who, by the nature of their calling, could not help wanting to ask, tried not to. Most of them went on to train their students not to. The most advanced theory in the most fundamental of the sciences was deemed to be stridently contradicting the very existence of truth, explanation and physical reality."

Why are Finnish schools so successful?

A blog article in the Guardian described the success of the Finnish school system:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/teacher-network/teacher-blog/2012/apr/09/finish-school-system

I commented:

The "free everything" element is not true of higher education. Tuition is free, and that's your lot. Living costs are high, accommodation is hard to find, and materials are not cheap.
The utopian tone of the article is a pity, cos it weakens a very strong case. Finland is riven by class differences and the usual social, economic and political tensions of well-off capitalist countries. Life is hard for wage-earners, and tough for the poor and for immigrants. And the egalitarianism (within class boundaries NB) is soured by Lutheran killjoy look-after-number-one-ism and who-the-fuck-do-you-think-you-are-ism. (Personally I'd rather live in Finland than Britain but that's cos I like saunas and the smell of wood...)
What the schools show is that decent education to a high general standard is possible and can feel natural without a socialist revolution - ie it's a bourgeois democratic aspiration that isn't utopian. All it needs is the political will. 
The proof of this is in the historical record. In Britain during the first flush of the postwar Welfare State local authorities sent hordes of wage-earners' kids to university for free - not just tuition, but the works, maintenance and all. And Britain (if we believe the capitalist mantra of "getting better all the time") in those days was a far poorer and shabbier place than it is today - far less able to "afford" this kind of thing. Which shows that "affording" is not the issue. 
Same thing in Sweden during the "golden years" of their Home of the People (folkhem) welfare state - say '65 to '90. The Swedish comprehensive system, like Finland's but far less formalistic, worked wonders for the kids and national skills, culture, etc. High PISA results for instance. Dazzling performance in research, sports, culture (ABBA :-). In 1991 (I think it was) the Economist even had a panegyric about it. Great high general level of education produces the skills and attitudes needed by business and industry. Trouble is, the article was published just after the then minister of education, Social Democrat Göran Persson, soon to be prime minister, had begun the ruthless dismantling of the system the Economist loved so much. 
Swedes, compromising hypocritical bastards that they are in government, are nothing if not ruthless and single-minded when they want to be (ask any Europeans on the receiving end of the armies of Gustavus Adolfus or Charles XII :-D. They began by emulating Britain, and have now ruined the educational system so thoroughly that Britain is beginning to emulate them (how about "free schools" allowed to operate for profit??).
Again, it's not a question of "affording" anything. Sweden today is pig-richer than ever. It's the political will. If you think (as a bourgeois government) that you can get away with screwing the working class out of past concessions, you'll go ahead. Money is the whole object. And fear the decisive factor. 
So, Sweden and Britain used to be up there with Finland as admirable examples of educational achievement. Now they're slithering in the sewers with the rest and no better than they should be.
For various reasons (including a powerful teachers lobby with real political influence) Finland is still admirable, while Sweden and Britain are despicable.
The main thing I suppose is that there are no miracles or utopias involved. Finland is nothing like Utopia. Nor were Britain or Sweden a few decades ago.

It can be done, it has been done, and it can also be undone. ABOVE ALL, IT IS NOT A QUESTION OF BEING ABLE TO AFFORD IT.


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