Category: History and Policy

22 June 2017

As suggested by the name of this blog, I take the view that the role of history is not to judge, but to try to understand the past ‘how it really was’. What right have we to judge the actions of people who lived in times that we, with the privilege of hindsight, in the relative prosperity of early twenty-first century Western Europe, are fortunate never to have directly experienced ourselves?

But I also take the view (as discussed in an earlier post on History & Policy) that history can help us understand, and so help resolve, some of the problems that we face in the present. Although it is not for us to judge if people were right or wrong in the past, we need a sense of morality, together with an accurate understanding of what happened in the past, to help determine what we should do in the present and future.

This, of course, is to enter the domain of ethics, rather than history, so I have outlined below some ethical principles for assessing the relevance of the past to the present. These principles are expressed in my own words, as a form of personal morality, on the basis that as rational human beings, we can work out what is right for ourselves without having to resort to external authority, religious belief, custom or tradition. But at the same time the principles assume that everyone is different, and we can all work out our own personal morality, in our own way, for ourselves.

The principles owe a great deal to the philosopher Immanuel Kant’s Categorical Imperative, according to which we should always act in accordance with what we, as individuals, should logically and rationally desire to be a universal law that applies equally to everyone.

The first four fundamental principles, in the spirit of the US Declaration of Independence, I take to be self-evident:

1) Liberty of the individual – to strive for personal fulfilment and the pursuit of happiness

As human beings we have instincts, wishes and desires, to seek pleasure and avoid pain, but we can also learn from experience. Everyone should be free to fulfil their desires, whatever they may be, and obtain the means to do so by their own efforts, subject to the three points below.

2) Empathy and respect for others (equality)

We are not all the same. Other people’s desires may be different from mine and are not necessarily better or worse than mine, just because they are different.

3) Cooperation for mutual advantage (fraternity or fellowship)

As social beings, we cannot live alone and we cannot fulfil our wishes and desires without help from others. Everyone should be free to receive help from and offer help to others, provided they do not exploit other people, or abuse any power they may have, to compel them to do so.

4) Freedom to resist exploitation and the abuse of power

If anyone attempts to exploit or abuse any power they may have, to prevent me from fulfilling my desires, or to force me to help them fulfil their desires, I should be free to choose whether to submit, or to resist any force they may apply. The same applies to everyone else. We should be free to decide for ourselves whether to submit or to resist, in any given set of circumstances.

These four fundamental (and in my view self-evident) principles have four further consequences, based on our individual and collective knowledge and experience:

Rule of law

The ethical principles outlined in the first four paragraphs above can best be preserved, so that we can collectively fulfil our desires without exploitation or the abuse of power, and resolve conflicts without the use of force, through (as Kant and many other ethical philosophers have proposed) creating universal rules (i.e. laws and customs), which apply to everyone equally.

Mutual agreements, creating duties and obligations

Although not everyone is able to think and act rationally, in my experience the great majority of people do, so it is possible to create an environment in which we can achieve many (if not all) of our desires and resolve conflicts through mutual agreements, which create duties and obligations. Such agreements may be explicit and enforceable by law, or informal customs and social conventions, such as being polite and considerate to others. These duties and obligations limit our ability to fulfil our own desires, and oblige us to help others fulfil their desires. Cooperation is better than conflict.

The inevitability of conflict and the use of force

My desires may conflict with other people’s desires. There will always be someone, or some group of people, who are stronger and more powerful than I am, so I may not succeed in forcing, or even persuading, other people to do what I want. Similarly, if I use force to resist exploitation or the abuse of power by others, this will make it more difficult both for them and for me to achieve our desires, regardless of which of us is stronger. If everyone acted rationally, it should be possible to resolve conflicts without the use of force. But the use of force may be necessary, in certain circumstances, to prevent the abuse of power, the exploitation of the weak by the strong, and to enforce universal rules, that apply to everyone equally.

Ethical realism and the creation of institutions to enforce the rule of law

I also know from my experience that people (including myself) do not always act rationally and agreements may be broken. Universal rules are not absolute. As the conditions in which we live change, rules may need to be modified so they continue to preserve the four fundamental principles and help to resolve conflict. Institutions and social structures may need to be created to make, modify and enforce the rules, but no set of institutions is ideal. There is no ideal state or society. Universal rules and institutions established to enforce them need to change as circumstances and conditions change over time.

There is therefore no absolute morality, which brings me back to the point that the role of the historian is not to judge, but to understand what people did in the past, in very different circumstances, and draw appropriate conclusions and learn what we can from this. History, in other words, is a dialogue between the past and present, for the benefit of the future. You could say that we need history to understand the past, and a sound sense of morality to understand the relevance of the past to the present, and help us all decide what needs to be done in the future.

 

20 February 2014

In my last post, on History & Policy, I suggested there were two reasons why studying history can help us resolve some of the problems we face in the present. It provides background and context, to help us understand why people acted the way they did in the past, and it can help us think of options we may not have considered before, remove the blinkers of the present and open our eyes to other possibilities.

There is a third reason: history can remind us of fundamental principles which may have been forgotten. It can explain why institutions, laws, values and principles were first established, and help us judge if they need to be preserved, or if they no longer fulfil their original purpose and should be abolished or simply forgotten.

In my business career I came across the popular concept of the four stages of competence. Very briefly the idea is that, as individuals, we learn a new skill in four stages:

– unconscious incompetence: we don’t know we are doing something wrong
– conscious incompetence: we realise we are doing something wrong and could do it better
– conscious competence: we learn to do it right
– unconscious competence: we become so good at it, that we do it right automatically, without thinking

If you search for the 'four stages of competence’ on the web, most sites claim that people perform best during the fourth stage, unconscious competence, when they do something automatically, without thinking; like driving a car, or riding a bicycle.

But there is another side to unconscious competence. It can lead, all too easily, right round the circle and back again to the beginning, to unconscious incompetence. We can become so good at doing something without thinking about it, that we fail to realise that the world around us has changed, or that we have changed and are no longer as good as we thought we were.

It seems to me that a tendency to forget fundamental political, social or moral principles – why certain institutions were first created; the United Nations or the European Court of Human Rights for example, or why we elect MPs, or why we have elected local authorities – is very similar. We continue to do something because ‘it has always been done that way’, like going to the polling station to vote in elections perhaps? This may not matter, but sometimes we may be surprised when things start to go wrong, and we don’t know why – the law of ‘unintended consequences’.

For my PhD, I studied the years immediately after the Second World War, researching twelve important and influential British people living and working in occupied Germany between 1945 and 1948: what they aimed to achieve, and why, and how this changed over time.  Many fundamental aspects of the world we live in now were created at this time, in response to our parents’ or grandparents’ experience of the death and destruction of war. My parents, and many others of their generation, believed that they had to do everything they could to prevent another war and another Hitler coming to power;  that everyone, regardless of which country they lived in, should be able to lead a decent life free from fear of hunger, poverty, disease, or expulsion from their homes; that governments should be freely elected and should act in the interests of all those they represent; that minorities should have certain basic rights enforced by law, such as the freedom to speak their language and practice their religious beliefs.

These principles were embodied in many of the institutions created during or soon after the war in Western Europe and internationally, such as, among many others, the United Nations, the European Union, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), the European Convention on Human Rights and, in Britain, Oxfam and the National Health Service.

Fundamental issues such as these were especially important for the British people I researched for my PhD, working in occupied Germany. Their task, as they saw it, was to try to prevent another war, by disarming the German armed forces and dismantling weapons factories, but also by helping to create a set of political structures, after twelve years of fascist dictatorship, which would prevent another Hitler coming to power. They realised they could not do this on their own; it had to be done in co-operation with Germans, their former enemies.  The structure of the Nazi state had to be destroyed, but what should take its place? Should the structure and institutions of the Weimar Republic be restored? Or was this too risky? In many ways the constitution of Weimar Republic, established in 1918 after the First World War, was a model of good democratic practice, but it had not prevented Hitler seizing power in 1933.

After a not very successful early attempt to introduce British democratic practices in Germany, such as the first past the post electoral system, the people I studied realised that democracy can only be introduced in another country through a process of dialogue, not by force or by totalitarian means. As I wrote in my policy paper published on the History and Policy web site, Germany: a case study in post-conflict reconstruction, they agreed with leading post-war German politicians on many basic principles, even if they disagreed on the details of how the principles should be implemented in practice. For example, they agreed on the decentralisation of power, the need to protect basic rights and safeguard the individual against excessive demands from an authoritarian government. They agreed that the electoral system should promote stable government with an effective but loyal opposition, that it should discourage extreme or ‘fractional parties’, and that electors should vote for a person to represent them, as well as voting for the political party that best matched their views and interests.

In Britain today, many of these principles appear to be forgotten. Central government has taken more power from local government. The government and right-wing press are arguing that decisions of the European Court of Human Rights should not apply in Britain. Extreme political parties, such the BNP and UKIP have not (yet) succeeded in gaining significant representation in Parliament, but there is no guarantee that the British electoral system will discourage this in future. As the number of people who vote in elections declines, (the turn out in the recent Wythenshawe by-election was as low as 28%), it is easier for a small number of activists to secure a majority in some constituencies. New technologies could enable electors to vote in direct referenda on a number of issues, which may have the advantage of increasing participation, but runs counter to the principle of representative democracy, in which voters elect an individual, who can, or should, study and consider the issues and act accordingly. In a referendum, decisions on complex issues are made by a simple majority of electors, voting to express an opinion which may be carefully considered, but may also be based on hearsay, prejudice, or influenced by emotionally charged campaigns in the press.

History does not provide all the answers, but it can help us ask the right questions.