A word from Officer K: The World Karl Saw
Editor's note
***
This is a story about a man, his ideas, a book, and a footnote.
First, the man.
Of all the thinkers from the past century who have something meaningful and functional to say about the times and the manners of 2023, the one who stands out most for me is not a household name: Sir Karl Raimund Popper.
Popper gets little mention along with the likes of Einstein, or Stephen Hawking. But Popper deserves that grade of esteem, because he offered much to think about in two realms of overarching importance in our lives: the nature of scientific discovery, and the importance of democratic societies. One cannot exist without the other, he argued, and in his works he showed how it was necessary to preserve each for the sake of both.
We now live in times both vibrant and troubled enough to see this for ourselves, and to apply Popper's insights with redoubled vigor. For we need them more than ever.
The Growth Of Our Knowledge
Next, the ideas.
Throughout his eighty-plus years, Popper was preoccupied with two major questions about science and human understanding:
- What is the difference between "scientific" knowledge, and other kinds of knowledge?
- How is it that we expand our understanding of the world?
Popper argued scientific knowledge was not a matter of the language of science -- not its jargon, not its terminology. It was about its logical construction. It was also not a matter of proof, because all one needed was a single contrary example of something to bring down a thousand supporting examples. "There are no black swans here" only needs one black swan to be wrong.
What mattered in science was what Popper called "falsifiability" -- whether or not a given theory or statement about the world could have some way to be proven false. Unfalsifiable statements might still be meaningful or useful, but they were not scientific. Metaphysics could be a source of inspiration, but only insofar as it could supply us with things we could test.
From this principle came Popper's other big conceit: We expand our knowledge of the world not by arguing about meanings, but by proposing bold explanations for facts and trying to prove them wrong. The better a theory stands up to criticism and attempts to falsify it, the better it will serve as an explanation for the facts of the world. And the better an explanation it can provide over a previous theory, the better a theory it is. We may never get to the truth itself, but we can move in the direction of the truth by being incrementally less wrong. Nothing can ever be completely proved, but everything can (and should be) tested in good faith.
Arguments about meanings of words were, for Popper, vacuous. He did not think a question like "What is energy?" was answerable, or even very useful to ask. He did think a question like "Why do light rays penetrate glass but not metal?" was a fruitful one, because a) it gave us something we could answer by way of a theory, and b) we could subject that theory to good-faith scrutiny. Narrow, focused, testable questions were to be preferred over larger, vaguer -- and unfalsifiable -- ones.
These ideas, and all that followed from them, were laid out in his book The Logic of Scientific Discovery (1934). A key corollary of all of the above was how this kind of debate could take place only in a certain kind of society -- one that valued constructive disagreement and debate as a first principle. A society of men who cannot admit to being wrong, or to having their ideas interrogated, is not a society that will do much science. In time, it will not be much of a society either. (Ironic that Popper himself was seen by many as dogmatic and intransigent, a difficult man to like even if he did command respect.)
The Open Society And Its Enemies
Now, the book.
By 1937, Popper and his wife found themselves living in a society increasingly ruled by men who did not want their ideas interrogated. Popper was Austrian, and while Popper's family had converted to Lutheranism before his birth, their Jewish heritage was a matter of public record. He sensed, all too correctly, that there would soon be no room for men like him in Hitler's world.
After considering a flight to England (where Popper had the promise of a university chair waiting for him), he reasoned there were people in greater immediate danger than he who would benefit from such a post. He elected instead to relocate to New Zealand. There, at Canterbury University College, he found a hardscrabble existence -- he found most of the administration and faculty insufferably provincial -- but found welcome company amongst a few like-minded peers (e.g., Sir John Eccles, later to win a Nobel Prize).
But Popper did not want to simply hide out on the far side of the world from the Nazi menace. He wanted to strike some kind of blow against it, and in favor of the democratic and tolerant nations that were among those arrayed against the Third Reich.
What kinds of ideas, he wondered, caused societies to turn against reason? What if those ideas seemed to many people like high-minded achievements, but were really just superstitions in pretentious new intellectual clothing? And what if those ideas were the products of some of history's greatest and most respected thinkers, both ancient and modern?
What if the flight from reason, in other words, looked like reason itself?
It took Popper until 1943 to write the book that discussed these ideas, and it disappointed him that his "war effort" would only see the light of day after World War II had already ended. But The Open Society and its Enemies, as the book was called, gave Popper wide recognition in the English-speaking world as a first-rate thinker. It also stirred controversy, as he attacked in its pages men whose reputations also as first-rate thinkers seemed unimpeachable: Plato, Toynbee, Hegel, and Marx.
Popper's argument is laid out in the book's opening paragraphs:
[This book] sketches some of the difficulties faced by our civilization — a civilization which might be perhaps described as aiming at humaneness and reasonableness, at equality and freedom; a civilization which is still in its infancy, as it were, and which continues to grow in spite of the fact that it has been so often betrayed by so many of the intellectual leaders of mankind.
It attempts to show that this civilization has not yet fully recovered from the shock of its birth — the transition from the tribal or 'closed society' with its submission to magical forces, to the 'open society' which sets free the critical powers of man.
It attempts to show that the shock of this transition is one of the factors that have made possible the rise of those reactionary movements which have tried, and still try, to overthrow civilization and to return to tribalism.
And it suggests that what we call nowadays totalitarianism belongs to a tradition which is just as old or just as young as our civilization itself.
Over the course of the first volume, Popper examined how Plato's brilliant and influential philosophical achievements were used to justify reactionary politics of a disturbingly modern bent. For they were not new political ideas in the slightest.
Plato believed in a state where all things were ordained by the philosopher-kings, and where selective breeding for brilliance would ensure only the best could or would ever rule. Popper contrasted this certitude with that of Plato's teacher, Socrates, who stressed instead the importance of independent thought, the marketplace of ideas, and the constant maintenance of one's skeptical and critical senses.
Plato wanted a world of guarantees. Socrates felt a world of possibilities was harder, but had more promise.
The second volume of Open Society dealt with more recent thinkers who trafficked in what Popper called "historicism" -- the idea that certain trends across history or human society are inevitable, and thus cannot be fought against but merely surrendered to. One such thinker was the philosopher Hegel, whom Popper despised for being handmaiden to the Prussian crown's need to devise a philosophical countercharge to the French and American revolutions. The result was the first major intellectual pillar of the conservative movement -- the counter-revolution that abhorred change and glorified political stasis as the highest good.
The other thinker Popper surveyed could be scarcely more dissimilar: Karl Marx. The godfather of socialism was not someone Popper resented automatically; Marx had, after all, drawn valuable and morally fiery attention to the wretched working conditions the industrial revolution had brought to England and many other nations. The diagnosis of the problem, Marx had down pat. Where Popper parted company was Marx's prescription -- socialist revolution -- and more than that, the idea that socialist revolution was an inevitability, that it was scientifically certain.
The common thread through all of these men, as Popper saw it, was the idea that history could be interpreted as prophecy, as part of the ancient thirst for certain knowledge.
Is it within the power of any social science to make such sweeping historical prophecies? Can we expect to get more than the irresponsible reply of the soothsayer if we ask a man what the future has in store for mankind?
Popper's answer was a resounding no. "History has no meaning," he insisted in the concluding section of Open Society -- in the sense that no one aspect of our past ever completely predicts our future. Certain knowledge was neither possible nor desirable, but steps towards the truth were possible. In fact, they were all we really had.
Neither nature nor history can tell us what we ought to do. Facts, whether those of nature or those of history, cannot make the decision for us, they cannot determine the ends we are going to choose. It is we who introduce purpose and meaning into nature and into history. Men are not equal; but we can decide to fight for equality. Human institutions such as the state are not rational, but we can decide to fight to make them more rational.
The antidote to all this, Popper insisted, was the "open society" -- the society where, instead of destiny and closed-ended determinism, we have open debate about our ideas and our future. His ideas about how science could progress, and how our knowledge could grow, were the same as how our societies could progress and our civilizations could grow. Each mirrored the other, and it behooved us to cultivate both vigorously.
The Footnote Of Legend
And finally, the footnote.
Perhaps the most powerful and relevant passage in Open Society is not even in the text itself. It is in a lengthy footnote to Chapter 7 of the work. Some may already be familiar with it. I will cite most of it here:
... The so-called paradox of freedom is the argument that freedom in the sense of absence of any restraining control must lead to very great restraint, since it makes the bully free to enslave the meek. This idea is, in a slightly different form, and with a very different tendency, clearly expressed by Plato.
Less well known is the paradox of tolerance: Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.
(This next graf is the one that matters most.)
In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most imwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law, and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade, as criminal.
Another of the less well-known paradoxes is the paradox of democracy, or more precisely, of majority-rule; i.e. the possibility that the majority may decide that a tyrant should rule. ...
All these paradoxes can easily be avoided if we frame our political demands ... in some such manner as this. We demand a government that rules according to the principles of equalitarianism and protectionism; that tolerates all who are prepared to reciprocate, i.e. who are tolerant; that is controlled by, and accountable to, the public. And we may add that some form of majority vote, together with institutions for keeping the public well informed, is the best, although not infallible, means of controlling such a government. (No infallible means exist.)
(Emphases mine.)
If any one passage in the whole of Open Society, and maybe Popper's work as a whole, speaks to our moment in time, it is this.
We have found ourselves exactly in the difficult juncture Popper (and Plato before him, too) saw: when the self-avowed enemies of the open society are now using society's own openness against it.
Those who openly profess no faith in government or democracy -- or science, or facts -- are running for office, the better to dismantle the system from within. For a time, one such man held the commanding heights of power, and the corrosive effects of that reign are still unfolding around us. The term kakistocracy -- rule by the most corrupt or incompetent -- is no longer a two-dollar SAT word.
Over the course of his life, Popper found that most of the key questions we ask about our world are framed incorrectly. "Who is best fit to rule?" he thought to be a question as unanswerable, and misleading, as "What is energy?" The better question, he imagined, was this: "How do we best prevent the incompetent or malicious from doing too much damage with power?"
This we already know the answer to. We have been living out the experiment to demonstrate the answer to that in real time for some years now. The incompetent can only be kept out of power by way of a system of governance that requires our active participation, that allows us to vote out those who lead us wrong, and that may not offer us the best choices all the time, but makes it possible to steer away from the worst ones.
For a society's worst enemies are never external, but internal. They are not the armies of other governments, but those whose thirst for power transcends loyalties to creed or nation.
Popper did not offer guarantees. ("No infallible means exist.") He knew he could not, because that went against everything he had come to believe. Guarantees were impossible. What he could and did offer was a program of action, a set of processes for how to eliminate errors in our ideas, and in our lives. He did not believe in utopian solutions where all could be made well; he believed at best we could make ourselves less unnecessarily miserable. But even that alone would be quite the achievement.
And so ends my story of the man, his ideas, the book, and its footnote.
The man deserves a little more attention. The ideas are ripe for rehabilitation and renewal. The book is worth a read. The footnote remains a battle plan.