For the fourth and final essay in this series, we’ll turn our attention toward Karl Popper’s view expressed in The Open Society and its Enemies. This will help us to understand the political moment in which we find ourselves, which I hope can in turn help us to effectively navigate effectively despite the turmoil which surrounds us. In the first 3 essays of this series, we’ve reviewed the view of Albert Camus, that happiness is inevitable, we’ve followed that up with Simone De Beauvoir’s critique of seriousness, and we’ve finished with Friedrich Nietzsche’s recognition of the fact that the world does not yield to our reductivist tendencies. One question we are thus faced with is whether or not politics is worth our time, given the absurd nature of reality and the need to avoid serious fixations that sap our strength and poison us.
Karl Popper’s work is of particular interest in this moment because of his focus upon egalitarianism, which is a state of affairs in which individual empowerment yields collective benefit insofar as the society can be defended from those who have something to gain by undermining it.
The Trouble with Platonism
Plato’s philosophy meets with rough treatment at the hands of Karl Popper. I’ve defended the view that Bertrand Russell’s platonism, rather than the actual subject-matter of study in ancient Greece, is what Popper really finds issue with, but in the end it makes little difference. The problems arising from The Republic are manifold, and we cannot escape them. Reducing the complex problem of the proper governance of a city-state to a simplistic solution is a strategy that yields an ultimately limited benefit.
The American Constitution emerged from an attempt to deal with this difficulty via application of the principles of the Enlightenment. The system the Constitution enshrines in the United States empowers different layers of society in different ways, ranging from the House of Representatives as the most direct representation to the Judiciary as the most removed from individual voices.
In each case, different systems of power have arisen and developed their virtues and vices over the interceding centuries. The result is a system of government that embraces the higher ideals of the people and simultaneously undermines these ideals in a system of compromises that can work well or poorly depending on the prevailing state of affairs.
Characteristics associated with oligarchy are visible, as are more democratic and even timocratic trends. The fascinating part, when we’re able to step back far enough to see it, is that this system is an emergent property driven by the interactions between the various groups of people who participate in it. This situation leads to difficulty in predicting what will happen next, diminishing the value of the system by reducing its predictability and thus making it less reliable.
Plato’s description of the state of affairs in the city that holds each set of values is commonly appealed to in attempts to explain and predict ongoings in contemporary society in the United States, but these explanations hold limited value and leave us wanting more. Calling the government an oligarchy yields some value because it directs our attention to the ongoing trend of the next President’s last name being a good predictor of success in at least the primaries. Yet there are everywhere phenomena taking place that could not be observed in a true oligarchy, such as the rise to prominence of politicians such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who is brilliant and talented but not an oligarch in any meaningful sense of the term.
Pushing one set of ideals in an absolutist direction is hence weak as an explanatory/predicitive framework. As De Beauvoir notes in her ethical thinking, ambiguity must be embraced. We cannot adhere to the framework laid out in The Republic as an analytical tool. And this is where the power of Karl Popper’s insight arises.
Government Goals: Freedom & Ambiguity
Popper’s key insight in The Open Society and its Enemies revolves around the recognition that individual people must be free in order to successfully deal with the challenges of their environment. We understand that authority is a tool which must be wielded with the utmost delicacy to avoid catastrophe, but in some sense we are unable to avoid needing to use it. What, then, should we apply it to?
And how can we reliably predict when it will be misused?
Popper’s anti-authoritarianism is most profoundly visible in his resistance to simplistic rules. Simple rules must be resisted to mediate the destructive impact of modern society’s reliance upon authority and the accompanying necessity of punishment for disobedience. After all, certain actions which are destructive to the interests of the state must be prohibited to empower the state to ensure the safety of its citizens.
In general, the world is absurd for Camus for the same reason that memory is associated with weakness for Nietzsche. The problem with seriousness for De Beauvoir fits neatly here as well. The actions of the state must be forceful and yet cannot be driven away from capriciousness and error by the creation of a system of rules. The freedom of the individual person is at its zenith when the state takes no action unjustly against an innocent person, and at its nadir when it treats the innocent as criminals. And yet, an inability to punish criminal behavior leads to a reduction in the freedom of the innocent citizen as alternatives to the state arise in the vacuum it leaves behind itself as laws recede from the duty they are enacted for, which is to punish those who take actions that impede the freedom of others.
As a result of this state of affairs, government is continually striking new balances and renegotiating the social contract it exists to enforce. Though we Americans can see all too easily how imperfect our form of government is, and though we perceive all too readily when the delicate balance between obligations and rewards falls out of sync, we must nonetheless learn to appreciate what our way of life has gotten right. The positive freedoms we enjoy will disappear if we let them escape our appreciation for too long. It is only by understanding that the project itself is absurd, and hence doomed to get things wrong, that we can begin to understand what it gets right and what we as individuals stand to gain by collaborating in this shared greater enterprise that none of us has a reliable control relationship with.
Accepting Ambiguity
The difficult part of living in an open society is that sometimes, people who do not share the open society’s values can come to represent the open society for a time. The inevitable rise, as seen in The Republic, of the tyrant, is a part of the cycle and is an outcome that can do great damage to the open society. The approach that worked in the past involved existentialist ideals such as radical freedom, the embrace of ambiguity, the acceptance of individual differences between people, and a unified monocultural ideology that gained widespread acceptance throughout the world for decades.
In the present day, the monoculture has fractured and there are few ideas that approach or resemble the thought structures we were previously so accustomed to. But even back then, things weren’t so cut and dried. The political identity of the individual person has always been subject to pushes and pulls by different factions and the ideas that have animated them.
Politics is indeed worth our time, if we can manage to avoid taking it too seriously when parties we identify with lose control. Instability is to be expected due to the rapidly changing environment we live in with respect to both the climate that sustains us and the technologies through which we engage with one another. Openness invites risk, and risk is required to create new value. The open society can flourish because it enables individuals to take risks in pursuit of new ways to satisfy their needs.
As technology advances, people gain access to new ways of solving problems. Open source software and decentralized platforms are robust technologies that can ensure that people who want it can gain access to information upon which to base opinions and values. Although the open society must submit to various forms of government, it exists across borders and consists of like minds from around the globe who seek to increase access to knowledge and share the means of communication as far and as wide as possible. We may not have a monoculture any longer, but the monoculture never exactly stood for the open society in the first place. And hence things are the same as they ever were: we must adapt to improve, and we must work together to share the information we need to effectively adapt.
Humanism, therefore, is the good toward which we might collectively turn our minds if we want to see our conditions improve. Rather than submitting to the pressure to dehumanize one another, we must direct ourselves toward the goal of caring for each other.
