al_shaw

I’ve come to realise something about modern political disagreement following my appearance last year on BBC Radio 4’s Moral Maze to discuss Net Zero. The whole experience completely changed my perspective on politics and sent me on a massive intellectual journey, forcing me to examine deep philosophical assumptions and beliefs I had long taken for granted. During the discussion, I found myself returning to two deeply held convictions that I had long taken for granted: that Western civilisation has been, on balance, a moral force for good in the world, and that the Industrial Revolution represented an enormous advance for humanity. Both convictions are rooted in the Anglo-American Enlightenment tradition, with its belief in reason, individual liberty, scientific progress and the capacity of human beings to improve their material circumstances. I believe this view of modern Western civilisation is now under serious threat from within (left- and right-wing populism, eco-pessimism and Islamism) and from without (revisionist powers such as China and Russia). Following the debate, I came to realise that if you want to understand why intelligent people can disagree so profoundly about what ought to be done in life, it is often insufficient to examine their immediate political or policy arguments. You need to understand the deeper philosophical premises from which those arguments proceed, including their assumptions about the nature of reality, human nature, progress and what constitutes a good society. I think this gets to the heart of what we mean when we talk about political polarisation and the so-called “culture wars”. People are not simply disagreeing about policies. Nor is it about “comms” or individual personalities. Increasingly, we are operating from fundamentally different understandings of the world itself. Yet few politicians articulate the philosophical assumptions underpinning their vision of society. Take the nature of reality. Is it an objective order that we must discover and adapt to, or something we can shape through our will and values? These are the underlying questions in many of today’s debates, from transgender identity to energy systems and whether governments can override the laws of supply and demand. Instead of telling us what they fundamentally believe and why, politicians jump straight to political positioning, tactical messaging and policy announcements, leaving voters totally confused. I think this contributes to the growing fragmentation of our politics, which technologies such as social media are accelerating by reinforcing competing worldviews and making it much harder for people to recognise, let alone understand, the assumptions from which others are reasoning.