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Whatever you think of politicians, they have a crucial, albeit often understated, role in British life: they frame the ideas of who and what we are to care about. Such framing, aligned with (and often in step with) the editorial obsessions of the dominant media, creates what might be called the ‘majority moral conscience’ of a nation.

The role of religion has been, to a large extent, handed over to such politicians, who act as a sort of litmus test for our notions of good and evil, right and wrong.

The right-wing political classes, spurred on by an inevitable headline in the Daily Mail, tell us that migrants are a source of concern. That bully dogs are too. That addressing vaping, or drugs, or 'lefty lawyers' will address society’s failures. Such critique is, of course, never about their own shortcomings – always the fault of the other.

Many see through this. This month, research by King's College London and Ipsos UK found that almost two-thirds of Brits believe our politicians use ‘culture wars’ to distract from other issues, with 62% of those polled claiming that politicians "invent or exaggerate" culture wars as a political ploy. This is up from 44% some three years ago. 

In recent weeks, this enforced framing of what is good and what is not good has been tested to its limits.

Hypocrisy and Tribalism: The Dangers of Our ‘So What?’ Political Culture

Renowned weapons expert Dan Kaszeta, who was blacklisted by the Government over his tweets, explores how ‘amoral familism’ has come to penetrate our public life

Dan Kaszeta

The violence unfolding in Israel and Gaza has led to a polarisation and woe betide politicians who seek nuance. Conservative MP Paul Bristow was sacked from his Government post after calling for a Gaza ceasefire; Labour MP Andy McDonald had the whip suspended after saying the controversial phrase 'between the river and the sea' at a pro-Palestinian rally. As if you are unable to believe that the massacre of Israeli citizens by Hamas and the subsequent murderous bombardment of Gaza are both terrible events. 

Such a lack of consideration was there when Suella Braverman accused hundreds of thousands of people marching over Gaza of acts of hate. It was there in the Government’s attempts to criminalise, detain and deport asylum seekers. And it is there in its condemnation of international human rights treaties.

At the root of this dualistic framing – the distillation of complex issues to the singular poles of friend or foe – lies an erosion of the most complex of political emotions: empathy.

This has revealed itself in the COVID Inquiry, where it has emerged that Downing Street colleagues called each other ‘morons’ and ‘c****’, or in Boris Johnson allegedly thinking that old people should accept their fate in the pandemic. 

In the end, it is a deficit that impacts us all. 

Last year, former Conservative peer Patience Wheatcroft observed in the Guardian that “you don’t have to be a socialist to find UK levels of poverty intolerable – but Liz Truss lacks the empathy to see it”. As Wheatcroft noted, Truss “misread the public mood as well as the markets.” The consequences of her empathy deficit are, arguably, still being felt today as the Bank of England maintains rates at a painful high for many homeowners. But still, the former Prime Minister defends her actions.

This failure of Britain’s elites to properly accept their failings is widespread.

Analysis of Hansard shows that the word 'sorry' across the floor of the House of Commons has dwindled to its lowest level since 2000. Even when it is uttered – as in the case of former Health and Social Care Secretary Matt Hancock's apology at the COVID Inquiry – the sincerity is often justifiably questioned.

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In the end, empathy – to be of any meaning – needs to be bolstered by a willingness to accept one’s failures. The inability to do so, in the end, impacts the heart of democracy.

Many, disenchanted with the unempathetic political landscape, are distancing themselves altogether from news. Nearly four in 10 adult Brits are reportedly avoiding the news – a ratio that increases the younger they get. Rising inflation, war in Europe, climbing food and rent prices, and the looming threat of climate change have engendered feelings of alienation. 

So what to do about this?

Mariame Kaba's wisdom in her book, We Do This ’Til We Free Us, offers a path. Do not fixate on the “spectacular event”, she says. Do not put it higher than “the point of origin”. Instead of aligning uncompromisingly with a singular position, focus instead on addressing foundational problems – and seek to understand what led to the problem in the first place. 

We should reconsider empathy, while not the sole driver, as one of the most significant components to achieve such a moral and political view. Its increasing absence in the British political arena is not just problematic but detrimental to the body politic.

As we face this age of extremes, the need for empathetic leadership seems more pressing than ever.  We should consider this when gauging who we want to lead us: those who can bait the crowd or those who understand what causes the crowd to be so easily driven to anger.

The biggest winner from the referendum on the weekend is John Stuart Mill. 

There’s a strand of left-wing orthodoxy these days that deprecates free speech and brands opposing viewpoints as dangerous wrongthink. This firebrand mode of thinking is excellent at producing an engaged cabal of supporters, but its fruits will often face oblivion in the privacy of one’s own voting booth. 

The Yes campaign was undermined by its intellectual siege mentality. In the face of an implacable campaign, only the people already beyond the pale could raise legitimate objections, and so these objections were thought to be invalidated solely by the lack of virtue of those who raised them. 

Although John Stuart Mill is a dead white man, the Yes campaigners could do with reading his arguments for free speech and actually engaging with the viewpoints of the opposing side. When political decisions are made privately, it’s better to reduce the fervent engagement of your own tribe to garner more lukewarm support from the other.

Wikipedia defines ‘grey literature’ thus:

Materials and research produced by organizations outside of the traditional commercial or academic publishing and distribution channels. Common grey literature publication types include reports (annual, research, technical, project, etc.), working papers, government documents, white papers and evaluations. Organizations that produce grey literature include government departments and agencies, civil society or non-governmental organizations, academic centres and departments, and private companies and consultants.

Some of it is excruciating or just hard to take in. But there you go, no-one mistakes an annual report or many documents for anything less than bland contentless pabulum with some information that might be useful to someone if they know what to look for. And, on the upside, grey literature is often informative and unpretentious. Reports from ABS, BOM and other technical bodies are grey literature.

But there’s an active academic literature that seeks a similar audience. And here’s one formula for the worst of it. You wade into some topical area. You make some distinctions. You deal in ideas that might be the subject of learned investigations in specialist disciplines, but you take things pretty much as given. You might then do some research to get some ‘data’. You might count up the number of a certain type of organisations who have chosen to do Y and how many have chosen to do not Y. You then give talks and consult to said organisations or to those thinking and talking about them.

It’s all kept at a very general level, there are few if any examples and if they are, they’re cursory — illustrative, rather than to interrogate anything. Then you might call for more research. Here is a blog post whipped up from such an approach.

The rise of Knowledge Brokering Organisations (KBOs) has changed how decision-makers access evidence. Whereas in the past, decision-makers might have relied on internal research services, or favoured academics providing them with the latest research, governments across the world have invested in new organisations that can synthesise existing evidence of ‘what works’.

I’ve thought about What Works Centres. Do they work themselves? I have my doubts and set out what they were here. I’d go a little further here and say that they’re a good idea on a napkin. A good beginning to a discussion that might have led to some worthwhile institutional development. But the kinds of issues I’ve raised should have been a live part of their development. For instance, it’s telling that we speak about What Works rather than who made it work or where it worked and where it didn’t. Because it’s likely that, if something difficult is being done, it will be difficult to narrow it down to a stable, replicable ‘what’ and you might like to think more about promoting the agency of those who’ve done things that work. But then that would be more disruptive than putting out lists of decontextualised tips and tricks.

Of course people continue to say things like I said, but very much at the ‘ideas’ level. The What Works Centres themselves don’t seem to be wrestling with them, trying to transform themselves into things that might work better. (Or perhaps they are and I haven’t heard — that would be unsurprising.)

Here’s some more:

KBOs have emerged in countries with different political and policy systems. In all those countries, governments claim a commitment to ‘evidence-based policy-making’ and have invested funding to develop their capacity to use evidence, be that within government itself (for politicians and civil servants) and/or for practitioners such as teachers, doctors.

Explaining their emergence, our interviewees described various drivers, such as a charismatic individual inside or outside government pushing for the need for a new KBO, and the decreasing internal capacity of government and other decision-makers to fill this evidence function. Others spoke of KBOs being created to show that policy-makers cared about an issue and were aware of the lack of good quality evidence in that area.

And on it goes. Half-ideas lie strewn around. Another is social impact bonds. A good idea of sorts, but really only the beginning of something workable and obviously useful.

And on it goes. Reportage as analysis.

This post began as an ad for an artist with traditional and AI graphic design skills. If you want to apply, please be my guest. But the post also presents a nice simplification of a way of thinking.

Right now I’m wondering how to illustrate what I call “the off-ramp from reality”.

We can be deflected from really looking reality in the eye with wishful thinking. H. A. Simon argues that this happens in corporations.

What managers know they should do — whether by analysis or intuitively — is very often different from what they actually do. A common failure of managers, which all of us have observed, is the postponement of difficult decisions. What is it that makes decisions difficult and hence tends to cause postponement? Often, the problem is that all of the alternatives have undesired consequences. When people have to choose the lesser of two evils, they do not simply behave like Bayesian statisticians, weighing the bad against the worse in the light of their respective possibilities. Instead, they avoid the decision, searching for alternatives that do not have negative outcomes. If such alternatives are not available, they are likely to continue to postpone making a choice. A choice between undesirables is a dilemma, something to be avoided or evaded.

I’d say that, since Simon wrote those words this process has been industrialised by various processes including the specification of ‘corporate values’. Invariably they’ll define them as a list of pleasing expressions. But usually, the real issue is how those values get traded off against each other. An organisation might agree on these three values among others.

• We’re a close-knit team
• We’re always keen to improve
• The customer is always right.

Lots of people will be happy to sign up to all three, but I’d argue that we only really understand the reality of those values when we face the discomfort of how and in what circumstances one would trade one off against the other. Each value will sometimes be impossible to honour without sacrificing one of the other two. Supporting a colleague — always a nice thing in the abstract — might have to give way to the need to improve or satisfy a customer (in each case by reproving or disagreeing with what a colleague has done).

Note — according to an older tradition, the teaching of medical ethics, or the process of applying codes of conduct would focus people precisely on the uncomfortable dilemmas. If you really wanted to explore corporate values at your strategy retreat, you wouldn’t list your favourite values (This always reminds me of Woody’s mother saying to his father “Have it your own way, the Atlantic Ocean is a better ocean than the Pacific Ocean”.) Instead each of the small tables might explore situations where value 1 would be sacrificed for value 2 and vice versa. And why. But I’m unaware of that ever happening and very open to any counter-examples from readers’ experiences.

Thinking you can have all the values is just wishful thinking — and that keeps us away from reality. My post inviting you to the ‘alt-centre’ endorses James Burnham’s assertion that more than nine-tenths of political debate is likewise, just wishful thinking, or in my terms, an invitation to the ‘off-ramp’. ‘Freedom’, ‘equality’, ‘human dignity’ and ‘fairness’ are transcendental/metaphysical values:

From a purely logical point of view, the arguments offered for the formal aims and goals may be valid or fallacious; but, except by accident, they are necessarily irrelevant to real political problems, since they are designed to prove the ostensible points of the formal structure—points of religion or metaphysics, or the abstract desirability of some utopian ideal.  … We imagine we are arguing over the moral and legal status of the principle of the freedom of the seas when the real question is who is to control the seas. From this it follows that the real meaning, the real goal and aims, are left irresponsible. …

This method, whose intellectual consequence is merely to confuse and hide, can teach us nothing of the truth, can in no way help us to solve the problems of our political life. In the hands of the powerful and their spokesmen, however, used by demagogues or hypocrites or simply the self-deluded, this method is well designed, and the best, to deceive us, and to lead us by easy routes to the sacrifice of our own interests and dignity in the service of the mighty.

This off-ramp from reality distracts us with chimeras. It takes us to a weightless world in which you don’t have the discomfort of choosing whether you’ll sacrifice this value or that one. So when we get tangled up in arguing for ‘freedom’ or ‘equality’ as transcendent values or just the more mundane organisational values outlined above, we’ve already mostly lost contact with the more uncomfortable reality that these things do not exist in our world as abstract entities, but only ever in concrete situations and they do not appear with any force or clarity except where they are traded off against other things we also value.

There’s another off-ramp that operates not so much through our attraction to comfortable abstractions, but rather through our passions, particularly anger, self-righteousness and contempt. We take this off-ramp when a conversations fail to help us understand others or the world and lead instead to frustration and recrimination. The conversation takes the form of a discussion, but it’s really just an exchange in which two people stay in their own heads and talk past each other. Thus, for instance two people quarrel and each ends up thinking ‘that’s just what they would say’, without really trying to understand where the other is ‘coming from’.

Just as political debate takes the fantasy off-ramp from reality in the form of abstract values, it also takes this darker form. Let’s say you want to argue something about some ideologically contested issue — it might be whether we should be concerned about welfare cheating, or whether corporate tax should be increased or lowered or something more explosive like whether you sign up to a slogan which doesn’t solve some difficult edge case (trans-women are women?). That off-ramp of being accused of bad faith by those you suspect of bad faith won’t be far away. They would say that wouldn’t they?

And so the conversation never gets going. It just sits in preconfigured train tracks. More broadly political debate is mainly preoccupied with framing issues to provoke prejudices — the exact opposite of an engagement with reality and an invitation to thought.

And so to picturing this. …

Here’s the kind of thing I have in mind, though I’ve just put two AI images next to each other in a Powerpoint picture.

The idea is that the person is in the world and could travel somewhere real and find out more about it. But he takes the ‘offramp’ from reality to a fairyland of unicorns, rainbows and I think coloured ballons with people enjoying themselves, and then there’d be either one other pathway leading to reality — or as in the diagram with a number of other pathways.

But I’m discovering that, though AI can be amazingly good at generating some initial image, instructing it with additional text is often inadequate to get it to do what you want. Here’s the attempt of one person who’s worked on this.

The off-ramp and the separate worlds aren’t very clear. Another person I worked with from Upwork who was shown this ended up saying this:

I spent some time trying to generate some of your ideas this afternoon. Unfortunately, I was unable to create the specific concepts with the AI generator I use. I thought I could create the component parts and compile them, but I was unable to execute the basic idea of a highway with an offramp during my trial.  … I have been trying to conceptualize how to do it efficiently. I imagine you could create it with a digital painting, which is done by plugging a drawing pad into Photoshop. A person could create the base drawing that way, and then add the AI images behind them : ie paint the highway, paste in an exit sign and billboard from stock, then erase and add or overlay a section of AI fantasy world.

Anyway, you can see roughly the design I’m trying to work towards. It probably requires ‘mixed methods’ of AI generated images then supplemented with human-generated additions all worked on in a graphics program like photoshop. It could be varied — so that there could be a different off-ramp with a more menacing and angry hue to illustrate conversation that gets nasty on social media or perhaps several off-ramps of different kinds in the same diagram.

And there you have it. I hope the some people find the ideas in the post of some value on their own and whether they do or not, that this explains what kind of image I want to work towards.