Reclaiming History for the Left

Caroline Lucas has achieved little as an MP, though not for want of trying, but the news that she is standing down at the next election has triggered fulsome praise for the Green's only parliamentary representative, which is as good an indication as any that she hasn't rocked the political boat nor, to mix my metaphors, set an intellectual cat among the anti-intellectual pigeons of British public discourse. Predictably, her latest book, Another England: How to Reclaim Our National Story, has been well-received, not only by soi-disant progressives but by conservatives who find her English particularism resonant (it probably helps that she admits that leavers had the best tunes during the EU referendum). Though some liberal commentators have wheeled out the strawman of progressives being uncomfortable with national identity, this has simply served to allow them to exhibit their own patriotic instincts ahead of a new Labour government that will be swept to power on a sea of Union Jacks and England football kits. I'm not going to review the book, but I think the reception given it is a useful jumping-off point to discuss the idea that the left (however defined) can "reclaim" national history.

According to Sunder Katwala, "She suggests that an emotionally intelligent, progressive politics might focus a little less on factchecking and a bit more on how to compete to shape the myths, memories and stories that shape who we think we are to progressive ends." This is pernicious nonsense, not simply in the contempt it shows for history or the hypocrisy over "sacred facts", but in its twin delusions that progressives can succesfully compete to shape national myths and that such mythmaking can serve progressive ends. The first delusion is obvious when you consider the minimal influence progressives have over the media that construct the myths, preserve the selective memories and select the stories that collectively constitute our narrative history, and that's without noting what little sway it has is limited to "progressives" of a particularly conservative bent. This partly explains why she has recourse to the consolations of novels, but it should also be noted that fiction offers the chance to enact virtues that one might be reluctant to apply in reality. For example, as Katwala perhaps credulously puts it: "Lucas suggests the social consciences of Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell and Nevile Shute could inspire new arguments for universal basic income." Well they didn't at the time of writing.

Tim Stanley points out that what vibrates with him in Lucas's work is its concern with manners: "Blending art with political analysis, Lucas writes far more forcibly than authors of Left and Right who think a nation is defined entirely by its constitutional order, or that if the party they happen to support isn’t in power, England is lost for good. These fashionable doomsters lose sight of what really matters, of what really shapes a tribe. I’ve read countless books about the historical precedence for Brexit and Boris Johnson, but none that convincingly explains why the English obsess about the weather, let their teeth go yellow or make love in the dark with their socks on. I care far less about Magna Carta or the strength of the Royal Navy than I do about our once-solid reputation for good manners – being eroded, alas, by iPhones and the invasion of American familarity." There is an obvious echo of George Orwell in both Lucas's approach (salutary lessons about Englishness drawn from literary classics) and in Stanley's cultural commentary (he fails to appreciate the artifice of his own prejudices - e.g. the "yellow teeth" trope originated as an American critique of NHS dentistry). The point is that Lucas and Stanley, like Orwell before them, are operating in a conservative register.

The British left has long been bedevilled by the conservative tenor of its dreams of a better society, combining a pre-industrial rural nostalgia with the sober respectability of the self-improving working class. This tends to be heightened whenever there is the threat from the radical left, and the reaction invariably emphasises an aesthetic and moral critique over a material analysis, hence the prominence of the literary Fabians in the early decades of the twentieth century, the instrumental revival of Orwell in the 1980s and 90s, and more recently initiatives such as Blue Labour and the commentary of John Cruddas that sought to mount an emotional defence of a working class culture that rejected continental theory (and the EU). A good example from 2017 was Julian Coman's eulogy for Robert Blatchford's Merrie England: "Labour needs to return to 'its roots in a kind of moral and civic critique of the excesses of capitalism'. This was the core thrust of Merrie England, and the original spirit of a Labour party that had its roots in religion, not Marxism. But during the 20th century, the “ethical tradition” faded as the parliamentary party became more pragmatic and managerial, while the left pursued the more confrontational Marxist route of class struggle".

Progressives will struggle to compete in the shaping of national myths not only because of the asymmetry of power in the media but because their own historical ignorance tends to result in them believing that there is a radical kernel within the conservative nut. A good example of that this week was George Monbiot evoking the Norman Yoke, apparently unaware that Hereward the Wake and his ilk were originally popularised as part of a Victorian anti-Catholic campaign and more recently in the service of Euroscepticism. The problem with reclaiming history, like reclaiming symbols such as the flag, is that it concedes the struggle at the outset. You might as well try to reclaim the monarchy or the House of Lords. Where the left has advanced in the war of position is in presenting an alternative history, and we know the left has been successful here simply because of the scale of the reaction against it since its breakthrough in academia in the 1960s. In many ways this has been an over-reaction, ignoring that most history courses at British universities remain conservative and that the comment pages of newspapers are full of rightwing historians complaining about being silenced.

As ever, the right has sought to hijack the left's techniques and language, hence initiatives such as the History Reclaimed group, which seeks to turn back the "woke" tide and thereby resist the demands for a full accounting of colonialism and reparations for slavery. This is arguably a more accurate and therefore honest use of the word "reclaim" than is found among progressives, making it clear that the right once monopolised narrative history and is determined that it should do so again. Is this a fight worth having from the perspective of the left? The second delusion of progressives bothered by the conservative near-monopoly on popular history is that winning the fight will somehow lead to progressive political outcomes, but this runs dangerously close to making history a fetish with magical properties. Just as putting a million people on the streets to demonstrate against the Iraq War did not stop that war, so religiously attending the annual Tolpuddle Martyrs Festival to hear Billy Bragg sing A New England isn't going to result in the abolition of anti-union laws.

Computer Says No

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a misleading term because we don't have a full understanding of human intelligence yet, so the comparison is necessarily imprecise.  The Turing Test, aka the imitation game, isn't simply about a machine mimicing human responses - which is easy enough to do - but about our ability to reliably identify the expressions of human intelligence in comparison to software-generated text. The uncertainty as to whether it is a human or a machine on the other side of the screen reflects our inability to infallibly spot the human as much as our inability to unmask a computer-generated mimic. This uncertainty is obvious when we consider bureaucracy. Long before the possibility of LLMs, it was common for people to complain that interacting with commercial organisations or the state was like dealing with a machine. Bureaucratic procedures seemed designed to excise all humanity from what were notionally social interactions. As a result, bureaucracy was routinely derided as stupid, even though the manifestations of this stupidity were deliberately designed and presumably satisfactory to the designers.

The Large Language Model (LLM) approach to AI assumes that human-like intelligence can be derived from enough text. But there is a problem with this that is becoming increasingly apparent. Improving the model means expanding the corpus, but that in turn means more rubbish, which humanity routinely produces in text form. Many think that we may already have reached a limit and that futher expansion of LLMs will result not simply in diminishing returns but the passing of an inflexion point after which the models become dumber and dumber. The underlying issue here is not that factual errors in the corpus can give rise to "hallucinations" but that text is not a uniform expression of a general human intelligence. Rather text is a highly formalised set of what we might call genres. These are broader than knowledge domains, e.g. technical dialects, and reflect more generic purposes for which text is used, such as education or reportage. For example, the text produced by bureaucracy has well-known characteristics. It can be ambiguous, sometimes impenetrable and even downright nonsensical, but these are not necessarily failings from the perspective of the authors.

Henry Mance in the Financial Times recently noted how the problem of contamination is increasingly framed as one of reputation: "[the cognitive scientist] Gary Marcus suggests performance may get worse: LLMs produce untrustworthy output, which is then sucked back into other LLMs. The models become permanently contaminated. Scientific journals’ peer-review processes will be overwhelmed, “leading to a precipitous drop in reputation”, Marcus wrote recently." Reputation is an interesting word to choose in this context. It doesn't just suggest predictability or reliability - the idea that you will get the "right" answer. It also suggests that the answer is definitionally true because it is the answer given by authority. But this is a mundane truth rather than ex cathedra. According to Mance, "AI will become embedded in lots of behind-the-scenes tools that we take for granted." Again, the phrase "taking for granted" suggests that AI will advance to the point where its output is accepted as authoritative even if trivial. This doesn't assume that the AI will never be wrong, that it will be infallible, but that the rate of error will be low enough to be tolerable, much as bureaucratic mistakes are.

The future of AI may turn out to be restricted language models rather than the largest possible. Much of what is described as "AI training" is actually human intervention to limit the interpretative scope of the software: to rein it in. This will help address the contamination issue, essentially through brute force quality control, but it will also allow the AI to operate within a narrower semantic field where the epistemological rules are rigorously observed. In other words, just like a bureaucracy. This is intelligence in a very narrow, dry and unimaginative form. And that points to a rather depressing future. While there may be exciting applications of the technology in sexy areas like medical scanning and diagnosis, the big returns have always been anticipated in administrative and service functions, hence the predictions for "lost" jobs tend to focus on accountancy, customer support and the like. AI will probably thrive best in areas where rigidity of thought and a strictly bounded intelligence, even an unyielding monomania, is prized. 

Technological development reflects above all the appetite and capability of the socio-economic environment to exploit new techniques (or old ones rediscovered). And that in turn may be determined by the longevity and ubiquity of previous technologies. Famously, the Chinese writing system - tens of thousands of morphemes - led to the dominance of woodblock printing and the relative underutilisation of movable type until the mid-19th century. But the latter technology produced a revolution when combined with the Latin alphabet in 15th century Europe. To give a contemporary example, modern software is riddled with skeuomorphs, from calendar apps that mimic desk diaries to the shutter-click sound of a smartphone camera app. The visual and aural prompts are intuitive only to the extent that we have been trained to recognise their forbears. If camera apps mimiced the "poof" of a flashlight powder explosion, rather than a click, we'd still understand it perfectly well, despite few of us ever directly experiencing a magnesium flare.

We may not be able to create a genuine artificial intelligence - i.e. artificial in the sense that it convincingly mimics the human sort - because we cannot escape the constraints that we place on human intelligence. The great myth, shared by liberals and libertarians (though not echt conservatives), is that human genius is unbounded. In reality, it is inescapably situated in history and society. In theory, globalisation and modern mass media should mean that new ideas spread rapidly and pervasively, but you'd have to be naive to imagine that there are no technologies underappreciated or lying dormant in the modern world. AI hasn't come to the fore because it is our shining hope (though it's worth noting that it has quickly acquired the near horizon of expectation characteristic of fusion power), but because it seems already familiar, all too familiar, in its combination of impressive authority and crass stupidity. AI will advance largely through the realms of business administration and public services, and so it will inevitably inherit the cultures (i.e. the vocabulary and semantics) of those realms. AI will not be a Culture Mind, of the sort imagined by Iain M. Banks, but a faceless version of the DHSS circa 1983.

To the Greater Glory

In an LBC interview in which Rachel Johnson sought, under the cover of reflections on Easter and the decline of Christian worship, to push a polite, middle class version of the Great Replacement Theory (here in the form of mosques springing up across Europe as churches stood empty), Richard Dawkins, the evolutionary biologist and "famous atheist" (as Fox News put it, channelling their inner Viz), described himself as a "cultural Christian", which seemed to come down to regretting Sadiq Khan celebrating Ramadan. This immediately overshadowed Johnson's agenda and even led to the Daily Telegraph's parliamentary sketchwriter, Madeline Grant, hailing a "spiritual volte face" unprecedented since Paul on the road to Damascus, illustrating once more that this class of frivolous journalism is characterised by its inability to pay attention as much as by its lack of descriptive originality. Grant appreciates that Dawkins remains an atheist, but she none the less uses the term "conversion" to describe his act of witness, so what exactly is the professor emeritus converting to?

The obvious point to make is that Dawkins hasn't really changed his tune over the years. There has been no conversion, no sudden flash of revelation. He has been a cultural Christian - relishing the form but deriding the content - in plain sight all along. His rebarbative style was always an expression of the academic top table milieu that formed him rather than some innate radicalism. He would happily call you a superstitious idiot, but he would not support Denis Diderot's contention that "Man will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest". Too uncultured; too much redolent of the mob. Grant's article gives us a clue as to what is really going on here when it segues via some waffle about the decline of Christianity in Scotland to a full-throated attack on the SNP's "draconian hate crime legislation", which then links to the usual defence of St Joan of Rowling. Dawkins himself has been a loud defender of the novelist (and also Kathleen Stock) against what he descibes as trans activist "bullies". 

His fundamentalist defence of biological sex is driven by the same British empiricism that motivates his atheism. That philosophical approach, dating back to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, has obvious overlaps with the evolution of political and economic Liberalism, but it also stimulated Romanticism in the cultural sphere, both as an anti-Enlightenment reaction and as a compromise between conservative and progressive impulses. What Dawkins refers to as cultural Christianity is an expression of that: a man of science among the picturesque abbey ruins contemplating the sublime. But cultural Christianity has deeper roots, going back to the English Reformation. Dawkins is very much an Englishman in this respect, the parallel Scottish Reformation with its Calvinist intolerance and strict social observances being as uncongenial to him as contemporary Islam (Scotland enters his mental space only with the Scottish Enlightenment of David Hume and Adam Smith). And we shouldn't forget that the attack upon the Roman church, and the fact that it was a top-down movement - a raison d'etat, is as much a part of the evolution of English atheism as the Enlightenment was.

Anglicanism is ridiculous as theology, the monarch as head of the church being only the most obvious of its absurdities. But as an expression of a culture dedicated to property rights, born out of the expropriation of the monasteries under Henry VIII and the resulting emergence of the political gentry and the improving tenantry, it was immensely powerful and retains a cultural clout today precisely because of its legacy property portfolio. When Dawkins lists the charms of Christianity he quickly moves on from hymns and carols to emphasise the danger of losing "our cathedrals and our beautiful parish churches". He's not talking about Catholic churches or Methodist chapels here, and nor is he making a point about architectural merit. Likewise, Rachel Johnson's worry that those churches are emptying while new mosques spring up is not simply Islamophobia but a belief that "our" culture is defined by its property and more precisely by who has the right to own it. She admits her own Christianity "waxes and wanes" as if this wasn't the most Anglican statement imaginable.

Both Dawkins and Johnson are products of the English gentry so this mindset is natural to them. They cannot imagine a country in which the right sort - i.e. people like them - aren't in control. When Dawkins describes Christianity as "a fundamentally decent religion", in contrast to Islam, he isn't making a theological point but describing his comfort with an "ethos" that is congenial to him and his class, and congenial precisely because it is the historic expression of that class's social and political interests. When he expresses concern that the King as Prince of Wales was sympathetic to Islam, he doesn't stop to consider that many of the monarch's subjects are Muslims: these people are other. Likewise, his distinction between Anglicanism and fundamentalist Christianity in America centres less on any doctrinal differences, or even attitudes to such matters as evolution, female ordination or abortion, than on the expressions of class: the idea that American Christianity is fundamentally vulgar and unschooled as much as it is irrational or bigoted. 

Some of his critics have pointed out the inconsistency in Dawkins being happy with the decline of Christian worshippers but unhappy at the prospect of losing Christian buildings. But to imagine that one depends upon the other is to misunderstand this country's history. The state religion of the United Kingdom is the Church of England (the official churches of the peripheral nations are irrelevant), but the raison d'etre of that church is property, not theology, and it worships the greater glory of the English gentry, not God. In appearing to line up with the forces of conservatism, whether expressed as Islamophobia or transphobia, Dawkins is simply reaffirming his own liberal credentials as he sees them: a robust defence of empiricism, property rights and the superiority of native culture. Not only is there nothing surprising in Dawkins' latest contribution to the discourse but he has proved himself once more to be wholly consistent in his views.