Letters: SDP rewrites D of P (1987)

Letters to the Editors from the June 1987 issue of the Socialist Standard

SDP rewrites D of P

Dear Editors.

As a committed and active Social Democrat, you may think that I have nothing to offer the socialist debate. On the contrary, socialism is seen by many to be out of date and out of touch, and ripe for extinguishment by Mag T. In a true democracy. this should not be allowed to happen.

I offer a Social Democratic alternative to your Declaration of Principles. Make of it what you will.

1. The ownership of the means of living is not in the hands of a human master class, but in the jaws of a faceless machine enslaving even those who believe they control it.
2. The antagonism of interest lies between those who collaborate with this machine, and those who do not.
3. The antagonism cannot be solved by the emancipation of particular collaborating classes, but only by abolishing those classes and enabling those trapped within to escape. The renewed vigour of those freed, working co-operatively for the benefit of each other, will lead to the downfall of the machine.
4. The “working classes" are being corrupted and abused by the machine which created them. True emancipation can only occur by relinquishing all class distinctions.
5. Every single person has the capacity to emancipate themselves by relinquishing his or her class, and recognising the common humanity of all.
6. The wealth and power of Government, when controlled by those who have relinquished class, will no longer maintain and serve the machine, but will exist to protect all people and to enhance their lives.
7. Political parties serving the interests of the collaborating classes are themselves bound together to the machine, and should be opposed as one.
8. The SDP of Great Britain therefore exists to create and defend an open, classless and more equal society which rejects prejudice based on sex. race, colour or religion.

I look forward to the day when my party and yours can stand against each other at an election. Until then. I hope your readers will vote for our Alliance.

Yours sincerely.

Jeremy Morfey

Bromyard.

Hereford

Reply:

We do welcome all contributions to the debate about socialism, especially from people who express thoughtful concern for democracy and an "open, classless society". Incidentally, the debate has been going on for well over a hundred years and countless politicians, like Margaret Thatcher, have dismissed the subject as closed, irrelevant or out of date. Yet it will not go away because it inevitably springs up again and again out of the conditions under which we live.

Our correspondent tackles the question head-on by arguing with our Declaration of Principles and substituting eight principles that he considers to be more true to reality. Let us examine these. The crucial clause in the alternative D of P is number Five, which says that it is possible to escape from ones class position by “relinquishing'' it. Well, it may be possible for an individual capitalist to relinquish their wealth. Unfortunately, the vast majority of us cannot relinquish our poverty. We may not all be starving or destitute but we cannot live on our wealth. However wishful our thinking we shall still be forced by our economic circumstances to sell ourselves to employers throughout our useful lives. This is what determines our class. Our function in society, and hence the pattern of our lives, will be as workers, whether we work in overalls or lounge suits; whether we are bossed around by others or are part of the management hierarchy ourselves. We are unable to relinquish our class position while capitalism lasts because our wage enslavement is the necessary condition for its continuing. It is out of the wealth that we produce, collectively as a working class, that the capitalist class in every country goes on expanding its wealth and the power of its state.

One of the ways of ensuring that virtually all society's wealth remains firmly in the hands of this minority is to keep the majority confused about it — ideally to persuade the working class that there is no capitalist class. All the major political parties are devoted to this objective. In this the SDP is in resolute agreement with Margaret Thatcher's party, as well as with the Labour and Liberal parties. They are unanimous in trying to deny the incontrovertible fact that society is forcibly divided into two unequal and inevitably conflicting sections of people.

Mr Morfey acknowledges that all is not well and offers his own explanation. In six of his clauses he refers to a "machine" — a machine with jaws but no face; a machine with which some people collaborate. and which others are "trapped within". but which can also have a "downfall". Obviously this is a metaphor; but metaphors should correspond closely with the reality they denote. Otherwise they lead to very faulty thinking. We use a metaphor in our Clause Six — the word "machine" to refer to the combination of people, organisations and equipment used by the state to defend and further the interests of the ruling class — this is the "state machine".

No one would claim that it is easy to understand. let alone describe accurately, the way modern society functions and is structured. Socialists rely heavily on earlier writers and thinkers, especially Marx and Engels. But we examine all ideas, even theirs, with ruthless scepticism. We try to make sure that the ideas correspond with our real, everyday experiences. Although our D of P was written in 1904, and its language shows this, it provides the basis for understanding what goes on in the modern world far more consistently and accurately than the theories which are produced with money provided by government or capitalist sponsors. We understand quite well why political parties such as the SDP hope to become involved in an interminable merry-go-round of forming governments. being thrown out. becoming a vociferous Opposition, campaigning to get back into office — and all the time real life for the great majority of us. the working class, is almost totally unaffected by it. A look at the government's own statistics about the ownership of wealth in Britain shows that our Clause One gives the facts, as opposed to expressing concern about a vague threat. This applies all through Mr Morfey's Declaration, but that is not good enough. The "political arena" is far too dangerous a battle ground to enter without knowing precisely what is happening and what is at stake.

Editors.

Scepticism is dangerous

Dear Comrade,

In New Scientist (16 April page 51) Ian Anderson reports on the annual meeting of the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal or SCICOP for short. The following is a quotation from his report which itself is a quotation from the meeting.

Polls have shown consistently that a majority of American teenagers believe in pseudoscience. Fifty-five per cent believe in astrology, for example. But reaching young people means changing the education system and Carl Sagan, in his talk, noted how hard that was going to be:

If we teach school children the habit of being sceptical, they may start asking awkward questions about economic, social. political and religious institutions. Scepticism is regarded as dangerous. It is the business of scepticism to be dangerous. That is why there is a great reluctance to teach it in schools.

This interesting comment by Carl Sagan (a well known American astronomer) on education in capitalist sodety I feel certain would be of interest to readers of the Socialist Standard.

Best wishes.

Bill Williams

Wood Green

Pathfinders: Ad Astra (2023)

The Pathfinders Column from the May 2023 issue of the Socialist Standard

What with rocketing bills, mortgages, interest rates and general life stress, most people last month very likely paid no attention to the fact that the European Space Agency launched a satellite to visit the planetary system of Jupiter (bbc.in/3MYXRnf).

The assembled scientists and officials all jumped up and down and hugged each other as the Juice satellite launched successfully and later phoned home to say it had unfurled its 98 square yards of solar panels. They were obviously pleased that their collective investment of time, effort and £1.4bn had not blown up. ‘But I do have to remind everyone, there’s still a long way to go’, the ESA Director General pointed out. Well indeed. Jupiter is a long way, especially for a craft with only the power of a domestic microwave oven, and which has to travel by an extremely circuitous 8.5-year and 4.1 billion-mile route around the inner planets before being slung out to the gas giant in 2031.

But it’s not the gas giant itself that they’re interested in. The Jupiter Icy Moon Explorer (Juice) is off to take a close look at Jupiter’s moons, specifically Europa, Callisto and Ganymede, the three little buggers that got Galileo into such bad odour with the Church back in 1610. If there’s life anywhere out there in the solar system, scientists think, it’s likely to be beneath the icy crusts of these moons. Juice is just the first step. Nasa is sending its Clipper satellite to Europa next year. After that there’s the question of a lander, and lastly something that’s capable of drilling through perhaps tens of miles of ice crust. Below that ice, Europa is believed to have an ocean 60 miles deep, ten times the depth of any ocean on Earth, despite only being one quarter its size. That means a relatively small rocky core that could be easily squeezed, scrunched and heated by the massive gravity of Jupiter, with the possibility of volcanic vents generating a rich chemical soup that might be the origin of life, as they are thought to have been on Earth.

There’s a lot of ‘mights’ and ‘perhapses’ in that paragraph, as there will be with any leading-edge scientific endeavour. What would it mean to find living organisms on one of these moons? In one sense, not a lot. It would make no difference to people’s lives on Earth, beyond being an interesting talking point in pubs or over dinner. Nobody is hoping for anything more than amino acids or micro-organisms at best, and certainly not little green frogmen or intelligent squid. But still, it would be the greatest scientific discovery of all time, proof that life on Earth wasn’t some singular anomaly in the universe, and strong evidence that, as most scientists already assume, our galaxy must be teeming with life. If you can find two separate instances of life orbiting one star in a galaxy containing 100 billion stars, and in a universe now thought to contain of up to 20 trillion galaxies, the concept of extraterrestrial zoology becomes a no-brainer.

All that would surely change humanity’s perception of itself in the cosmos. Instead of ‘us and them’ meaning competing nationalities, ethnic groups, gender identities or even warring social classes, we could have a sense of terrestrial unity for the first time, ‘us’ being all life on Earth, and ‘them’ being all life on other planets.

But before we get too starry-eyed and visionary, there is the ugly fact that we still live in capitalism, an astoundingly divisive and destructive economic system in which most humans are reduced to virtual slavery in the service of a rich and idle super-elite, and which relentlessly exploits global resources even at the risk of turning the planet into a toxic lifeless desert. Never mind what we humans think or feel about the cosmos, what does the logic of our present social system dictate?

The logic of capitalism is to exploit for profit whatever it can get its hands on. If it can get its hands on life on other moons or planets, it will treat it with the same wanton rapaciousness as it treats everything on Earth.

Humans will try to prevent it, of course. There will be moratoriums, new Outer Space Treaties, and an agreed respect for the ‘rights’ of extraterrestrial organisms. But if the potential for profit exists, the moratoriums will be ignored, the treaties broken, the respect disregarded. By hook or by crook, capitalist logic will be exported, virus-like, to new worlds and virgin environments to wreak its mindless havoc.

We have to stop that from happening, before any potential micro-organism is discovered on Europa or Ganymede. Humans on Earth must first put their own house in order. We have a responsibility, as intelligent custodians of our planet, to make sure that the destructive behaviour of our present class-divided society can never infect any other planet. We need to turn our social system upside down, and learn to operate sustainably as an egalitarian global community that collectively and sensibly manages its planetary resources, where things are made for direct use and not to be sold as commodities in a money system, and where the future belongs to all humanity instead of being slowly strangled by a parasitical property-owning elite. The only alternative to a money system is a non-money system. The only alternative to capitalism is post-capitalist common ownership. It’s not just a starry-eyed ambition, it’s a real scientific necessity. As Carl Sagan famously said, ‘If we are willing to contemplate nuclear war and the wholesale destruction of our emerging global society, should we not also be willing to contemplate a wholesale restructuring of our societies?’ The time to launch that restructuring is right now, before we launch any more spaceships.

Paddy Shannon

A plea for some rational skepticism (1990)

From the May 1990 issue of the Socialist Standard

  "There is today in the West (but not in the East) a resurgent interest in vague, anecdotal and often demonstrably erroneous doctrines that, if true, would betoken at least a more interesting universe. but that, if false, imply an intellectual carelessness, an absence of tough-mindedness, and a diversion of energies not very promising for our survival. Such doctrines include astrology (the view that which stars, one hundred trillion miles away, are rising at the moment of my birth in a closed building affect my destiny profoundly); the Bermuda Triangle 'mystery' (which holds in many versions that an unidentified flying object lives in the ocean off Bermuda and eats ships and airplanes); flying saucer accounts in general; the belief in ancient astronauts: the photography of ghosts; pyramidology (including the view that my razor blade stays sharper within a cardboard pyramid than within a cardboard cube): Scientology; auras and Kirlian photography; the emotional lives and musical preferences of geraniums; psychic surgery; flat and hollow earths; modern prophecy; remote cutlery warping; astral projections; Velikovskian catastrophism; Atlantis and Mu; spiritualism; and the doctrine of the special creation, by God or gods, of mankind despite our deep relatedness, both in biochemistry and in brain physiology, with the other animals. It may be that there are kernels of truth in a few of these doctrines, but their widespread acceptance betokens a lack of intellectual rigor, an absence of skepticism, a need to replace experiments by desires.”

—Carl Sagan in The Dragons of Eden.

Pathfinders: The Real War to End Wars (2014)

The Pathfinders Column from the November 2014 issue of the Socialist Standard

Attempting to explain how a four-dimensional being would view three-dimensional humans, Carl Sagan in Cosmos invited us to imagine our 3D selves looking down on beings in a two-dimensional universe. To us they would appear as cut-outs on a flat page, with length and breadth but no height, with no distinction between public and private space, with nothing concealed either inside their bodies or outside. If we tried to talk to these 2D beings, they would be astonished to experience our voice as appearing to them from everywhere at once, both internally and externally and through all their senses, like a ghost from some spirit world.

The far-sighted Sagan presented this analogy without the least expectation of it coming true. And yet in a sense it has come true. The internet has made it so.

Now we are all able to look down on the two-dimensional world of the internet screen and speak to it like a god, anonymously, as if from nowhere and everywhere. Simultaneously, we are all trapped in that 2D world, and anyone can look down at us, from above, right into the core of our being. And what is the result? Public and private spheres are now in collision, not just with the hacking of celeb or child nude pictures from cloud storage, not just by government agencies ferreting through our private correspondence, but in even more sinister ways. Now we are seeing inside the skin of humanity, as it were, into the hidden depths, and it’s not a pretty sight. Before the internet, communications were largely constrained within the social protocols of politeness and good taste. Nobody imagined that society had an inner beast or if there was, it was confined to a few demented freaks and kept well and truly out of view and behind closed doors. The ‘troll’ was a being that existed only in nightmares.

Now the lid is off and we are peering in on a panorama of earthly delights redolent of Hieronymus Bosch. This is not what anyone expected. It’s not just a case of a few intemperate hotheads firing off ‘flame’ emails or carelessly worded texts without explanatory ‘smileys’. Celebs are leaving Twitter and celeb Twitch gamers are turning off their feedback comments because of the amount of abuse and threats of ‘doxing’ – having their private information posted online. Sexting has resulted in new laws to prevent ‘revenge porn’. In the instantly reactive online environment, a stray word can result in death threats. Presenter Judy Finnegan and her daughter were recently threatened with rape (quite possibly by women) for making the innocuous suggestion that violent rapes were worse than non-violent ones (‘Madeley warns trolls over rape threat’, BBC Online, 16 October). In the GamerGate scandal, in which female games programmers have been terrorised for speaking out against the depiction of women in games, a planned feminist games conference had to be cancelled due to threats of a spree-style massacre (‘Feminist video-games talk cancelled after massacre threat’, BBC Online, 15 October). As tablet-toting children from 9 upwards join in as spectators of cyber delights including hard-core porn, 22 percent of boys aged 12 – 15 and 30 percent of girls report being bullied online, and at least as many know someone who is bullied or has suffered from deliberately embarrassing online exposure (‘Call for teens to self-regulate net use ‘, BBC Online, 15 October).

Society responds with more new laws to expose trolls by lifting up their stones of anonymity before they can scurry away out of sight. There’s no doubt that trolls are nasty pieces of work. Most commentators don’t feel the need to explore the question why. Trolls are just a fact of life. Every barrel has a few rotten apples. It’s human nature.

In what other familiar reality is it common for bullies to prosper and fear to silence critics? In what circumstances are rape and random shooting sprees considered normal? Where do we find social agreements torn up, civil rights trashed, human dignity laughed at, intelligence recruited in the service of stupidity, and anger geysering up as if from a limitless well?

We typically find those things in a war.

Looking inside the skin of society, as the internet now allows us to do, we are seeing many of the classic hallmarks of warfare.

This issue of the Socialist Standard carries the first of a series on current wars, beginning with ISIS. It’s a truism for a socialist to say that capitalism causes war, but as a statement it’s not nearly strong enough. It’s like saying that football causes knee injuries or that water skiing involves getting wet.

Capitalism is war, plain and simple. It’s not just market society with a war on top, it’s war all the way down, and can only be properly understood as such. Peace is a social myth we have constructed to delude or amuse ourselves in our leisure moments eating rat stew in the trenches.

Nation states, schools and commercial businesses are organised hierarchically, like armies, and we are all reluctant conscripts, squaddies whose task it is to fight whoever we’re told to fight, whose received ambition may be to make NCO or officer but whose real ambition, if we’re not blinded by patriotism or xenophobia or bloodlust, is to not get killed.

Understanding that capitalism is war helps to make sense of the news in a way that nothing else does. Random acts of violence no longer seem random. The fear and the paranoia and the endless search for scapegoats and snake-oil cures become explicable, even predictable. The impotent and irrelevant posturings of politicians are meaningless precisely because they are war propaganda, as bogus as Hollywood fantasies, monarchical pomp or religious preaching. This is not civil society with a few oddballs and quirks, it is society in shellshock, having a continuous mental breakdown.

Obviously this comes as a surprise to a lot of media pundits who fondly imagined society as different from this, and who now search anxiously for reasons, alibis and justifications. But what do well-fed semi-detached liberals know about the anger of the food aid queue and the final demand? It’s war, the reality show, and now on prime time and social media for your entertainment.

And where do you fit in? There’s no room for shirkers or conchies in this war. You don’t have a choice not to fight. If you struggle to make ends meet, you’re in the war. If you struggle against disability prejudice, you’re in the war. If you feel oppressed by white racists, loud-mouthed bigots, the council, the boss at work, the ‘male gaze’, you’re in the war. You don’t have a choice not to fight, but you do have a choice what to fight, and how to fight.

For socialists, the only part of this war that makes any sense, that is worth fighting, that might realistically stand a chance of ending war forever, is the class war, the war against the idea of capitalism itself, the mindset of private property and public poverty, the universal acceptance of oppression. Everyone else is fighting to win, or not lose, or just survive. If we were to win the class war, it would remove the main reason for fighting all the other wars. In socialism, society could finally start to recover from the hell it has put itself through.

There is an upside to the internet’s opening of Pandora’s Box. Humans are being forced, albeit reluctantly, to face their demons, to acknowledge the real state of affairs instead of paying lip service to ritual, custom and pretence. And capitalism, which traditionally masks its ugliness with these same rituals, is increasingly running out of dark holes to hide in. The faster we are communicating, the more we’re beginning to understand, and the more we understand, the sooner we will act.

PJS

Science versus spoon-benders (2001)

From the March 2001 issue of the Socialist Standard

I didn't much like science at school. It was my brother who took things to bits, not me. Mathematics was the worst, and afterwards an almost lifelong phobia. Physics was almost as bad as Maths. Chemistry was only interesting when something exploded. Biology seemed designed specifically to put me off my lunch. Science for me was just another cross to bear in a Christian school. 

Fortunately we find ways of justifying our little ignorances to ourselves. I accepted the ancient and venerable "two brains" theory of learning, according to which you either have a scientific brain or an artistic brain. There was no point trying to learn science if you didn't have "that sort of brain", and anyway it was better not to have "that sort of brain" because then we wouldn't be us, and goodness but weren't we interesting people! We were all artists in those days, naturally, and everyone knew that scientists had no imagination and no creative talent. Apart from Tom Lehrer, the singing mathematician, that is, but we'd allow them one. We decided that science was clever the way a performing poodle is clever, good at a few tricks but not really genteel company for dinner. And this wasn't just my snobbery. Post-war Britain just couldn't seem to turn out scientists, its very culture was against it. Nobody wanted to do science because it was work as in "manual work" not as in "work of art". Everyone in the sixties wanted to be a beat poet, even the snotty little kids like me. Harold Wilson tried to do something about the huge bias in education towards the Humanities (the very name suggested that scientists were inhuman). Britain was up to its shins in philosophers and therapists, and no-one to mend the roof or rewire the sitting-room. My local LETS scheme is still the same today. But while Wilson talked thrillingly of the "white heat of technology", everyone continued to regard science as a good thing for someone else to learn, and his new science-oriented Polytechnics turned out to be dustbin colleges for those who couldn't get into a real University.

Was god an astronaut?

In my late teens Britain was swept by a “revolutionary” new theory, propounded by a best-selling author, to the effect that God was an astronaut. In book-after-book the theory expanded, multiplied, made ever larger claims and sold ever more copies. Everyone, it seemed, had read these books. Everyone, it seemed was talking about them. Conventional science, astonishingly, was silent.

Like the excellent scientist I was, I ignored the text, looked at the pictures, read the captions and the blurb on the back cover, and concluded that it must all be true. He'd gone to a lot of trouble after all, so he must know what he's talking about. The phrase "don't believe everything you read" came back to me, but really, how was one to tell? Even supposing I read every word properly, how would I know whether it was right or not? Who was I to criticise? You needed to be a scientist to criticise.

Eventually, at last, it had to happen. The scientific community wearily responded. The BBC flagship science programme Horizon finally dealt with Erik von Daniken's theory. In fact it destroyed his case so comprehensively that even I, the eminent believer, had to laugh out loud. I'd been had, big time, and so had everyone else. Maybe I should have been annoyed at having my time wasted, or being made a fool of, but I wasn't. We can forgive any sin if it's entertaining.

It made me think of other times when I'd been conned, or baffled, usually both, by some fantastic claim. Uri Geller, the mind-control and spoon-bender, had me and my friends stroking teaspoons. We read assiduously the Arnall Bloxham tape transcripts of people regressing into past lives, serialised prominently in that most august periodical the Sunday Times, and were astounded when Bloxham admitted he'd cheated. At school we tried using Ouija boards to try to get in a quick communication with the hereafter before Afternoon bell. After much tumbler wrestling we got a name, Bill, and a date, 1780, and we went around in awe for a week. I didn't think of myself as gullible, or even ignorant. After all, the world was an amazing place and anything was possible. I could criticise a poem but not a proposition. School didn't arm me for that, despite the pickled frogs and the fizzing chemicals.

"Scientific Socialists"

By the time I encountered the Socialist Party I had already learned how to criticise society for myself, and I understood the importance of reason, but I was nevertheless startled by the party's description of their “scientific socialism”. I envisaged a whole population in lab coats. A scientific socialist to me was a party member who knew the Periodic Table. But it was explained to me that it was the "method" that was "scientific", not the membership. This meant nothing to me. They weren't saying simply that the case for socialism was a logical one. It was more than that. Any stupid idea can be expressed in logical terms. What was “scientific” was not so much the argument itself but the means by which the argument was first thought out, the habitual mode of thinking of the individual. And the scientific method which socialists follow is both open-minded and sceptical, willing to embrace or drop an idea depending on the evidence, willing to change the theory if the evidence demands it. Carl Sagan described it well:

"Science is generated by and devoted to free enquiry: the idea that any hypothesis, no matter how strange, deserves to be considered on its merits. The suppression of uncomfortable ideas may be common in religion and politics, but it is not the path to knowledge."

Those who criticise our rejection of religious beliefs do not perhaps grasp this "scientific" nature of the case for socialism, that it is rooted in the real world of hard facts and reliable evidence, and so must people be if the world is to see any real progress. But we don't particularly have it in for the God squad, because they're not the only mystery merchants out there spreading fog and confusion wherever they go. There is a plethora of pseudo-sciences to choose from if virgin births and original sin are a bit hard to take and Buddha is uncool. In my area recently there was a spate of UFO sightings, and the local press had a fun-filled week out of it. Judging by the number of sightings, I should have been abducted for experiments long since, with the rest of the town. No aliens have called, however. They probably watched one episode of Eastenders and decided not to bother with homo sapiens.

According to a report in Cultural Trends, in the past five years the market for "new age" and occult books has grown by 75 percent. As Catherine Bennett observed in the Guardian a while ago:

"neither incoherence, nor ignorance, nor overwhelming implausibility is any impediment to publication. These books are not going to face scholarly competition, but sell in a dedicated drivel department, along with feng shui, astrology [etc]" (31 October 1998).

She deliciously strips bare the pretensions of one particularly awful offering from Channel 4, called Quest for A Lost Civilisation. Graham Hancock, the best-selling writer, is firmly in the von Daniken tradition:

"Hancock's principal strategy is to exploit his readers' ignorance, dazzling them with irrelevant sums, flourishing spurious connections . . . He asks big questions, rushing on before you realize he hasn't answered them."

She concludes, correctly, that publishers don't give a damn about truth so long as they sell books, and attacks the scientists who, by remaining "mute with distaste" actually do the von Danikens a big favour. And she is right. Very few scientists seem worried about what the rest of us believe. Undoubtedly, scientists have themselves to blame if nobody understands what they're doing. In increasing desperation, Horizon has devoted no less than three programmes in the past year to unravelling Hancock's nonsense, such is the demand for fake science in a fantasy-filled world. Yet still scientists seem to think they can ignore reality, rather like Archimedes thought he could rudely ignore the Roman sergeant with the drawn sword.

Common sense rules 

But it's not all their fault, and it wouldn't kill us to be a little more scientific in our thinking when considering the world around us. Surprisingly, it's not that difficult, if one observes a few basic rules, most of which are common sense. That these rules can be applied to politics as much as science will be illustrated in the course of description. This list is probably not exhaustive, (10 seems a suspiciously round number, for one thing) and I invite readers to send in their own suggestions.

1. First of all, don't believe a complicated explanation if a simpler one will do. 

This rule, known as Occam's Razor, would really dismiss von Daniken instantly. After all, it is simpler, and fits all the facts, to believe that astronauts did not land on Earth in prehistory than to believe that they did. Lack of hard evidence for UFOs can be, and often is, enthusiastically ascribed to a huge government cover-up, but conversely, and more simply, it could be ascribed to the fact that UFOs don't exist. In politics too, conspiracy theories are seldom the simplest explanation for anything, even if they appeal to some people's penchant for paranoia.

2. A second rule would be: never believe anyone who will profit by lying.

This lets out every politician, I fear, as well as best-selling authors. By the same token, if one applies this rule to the Socialist Party, which has no plans to take power for itself now or in the future, its statements are automatically rendered more reliable than those of Trotskyist groups with a vested interest in being leaders. That doesn't mean we're always right, just that we have no particular reason to lie about it.

3. Exceptions don't prove rules, despite the saying, they break them.

The term "prove" in this expression is related to the Italian "provare" which means "test" or "try out", which explains how this sensible maxim has acquired a modern, nonsensical meaning. As an illustration of this rule, if some societies are known to be peaceful, it destroys the claim that humans are basically aggressive and warlike. If a majority of people are poor in capitalism, it destroys the claim that capitalism is in the common interest or that it is a "good provider".

4. Even if the structure is logical, the basic assumptions may not be.

As an example, capitalism is a supremely logical structure, based on the assumption that resources are limited but wants are unlimited. When one examines this assumption critically there appears no justification for it at all, and the entire structure sinks like a Monty Python castle built on a swamp

5. Beware of the sleight-of-hand known as special pleading, which is essentially a sales tactic.

Emotive arguments are a good example of this, and very common in politics, where it is hard not to be emotional sometimes. I recall a woman defending the Peace Camp at Greenham Common thus: “Something that feels so good just can't be wrong.”

6. Don't be bamboozled or "blinded by science". 

Carl Sagan relates how, when discussing with an Egyptologist the theories of Velikovsky (who had been excitedly compared to Darwin and Einstein by the popular press), he had remarked that the ancient history looked impressive whereas the physics was nonsense, whereupon the Egyptologist responded in surprise that he had thought precisely the reverse. Even scientists can temporarily be taken in. Anything emanating from government experts, especially economists, needs to be treated with caution.

7. An idea is not a valid theory unless a way exists of disproving it (falsification). 

Hence, the argument that God exists is not a valid theory, whereas you can disprove the case for socialism by showing, for example, how material abundance is impossible to achieve.

8. A test result is not valid until and unless it can be recreated. 

One recent sensation was the achievement of "cold fusion", another was the transmission of light at 4.7 times the speed of light. Neither have been successfully repeated. Governments which claim economic success once are certainly just lucky, and are unable to repeat this success later, when conditions have altered.

9. A theory which cannot predict anything is worthless.

If the Socialist Party's analysis was incorrect, its predictions would also be. However, we have a surprisingly good hit rate over the past 100 years.

10. The most obvious (but most often broken) rule is that if the facts don't fit the theory, change the theory.

You don't need to be a scientist to know that, but you need to think like a scientist to stick to it.

Will reason win?

Socialists try to apply these rules to society, and expect to have them applied to their own case. Perhaps we are not always as rigorous as we should be. Perhaps you aren't either. So if you think you can disprove all, or part, or a bit of our case, go right ahead. We'll listen. If you find a flaw we'll have to change our ideas, and if, by the same token, we find a flaw in your thinking, you'll have to change yours. That is how the scientific method works. It doesn't mean you won't ever fall for a con, or make a mistake, but it makes it much less likely.

The world is as full of superstition and silly ideas as it was in the Middle Ages, but it is far richer in knowledge. Whether the scientific method prevails in the future is open to question, for it has failed in the past to rescue societies from decline, and the ideology of capitalism is reinforced constantly by a battery of propaganda and mystification that are a perpetual obstacle to clear thinking. The battle is ongoing, and will continue in this new century, and reason will either win or it won't. The last word ought to go to that supremely humanitarian scientist and visionary, the late Carl Sagan:

“Humans have evolved gregariously. We delight in each other's company; we care for one another. We cooperate. Altruism is built into us. We have brilliantly deciphered some of the patterns of Nature. We have sufficient motivation to work together and the ability to figure out how to do it. If we are willing to contemplate nuclear war and the wholesale destruction of our emerging global society, should we not also be willing to contemplate a wholesale restructuring of our societies?”

Paddy Shannon 

Pathfinders: Why Gould was wrong, and why Dawkins might be even more wrong (2007)

The Pathfinders column of the November 2007 issue of the Socialist Standard

A science writer who knows how to communicate to a lay audience is a rarity. But to find two in the same field, battling each other’s ideas in the public domain, is a real treat, and the long-running contest on evolutionary theory between the late Harvard palaeontologist Stephen Jay Gould and the Oxford ethologist and biologist Richard Dawkins was a gem of the first rank. If the modern science-inclined public has better than a cartoon Darwinist grasp of the complex story of evolution it is in no small thanks to these two outstanding writers.

Their disagreements were neither feigned nor frivolous. They argued about whether evolution worked at the level of the species animal or group (Gould) or the individual gene (Dawkins). They argued about whether evolution went in fits and starts (Gould) or as a continuum (Dawkins). They argued about whether evolutionary mutations were as often as not meaningless aberrations or freaks of ‘historical contingency’ (Gould) or purposeful and deterministic adaptations (Dawkins).

While the debates were never quite this simplistic, it’s fair to say that the two men followed distinctive trends in their thinking. For Gould life was largely a series of existential accidents, without purpose or goal, and with many evolutionary jokes and anomalies thrown in. One has only to consider the Permian extinction, which killed 95% of all species on the planet, to understand how capricious nature can be. And that was only one of five great extinctions, each clearing the decks for an explosion of new and unprecedented life-forms, each a blind roll of the dice. As Gould was fond of saying, if you rewound the tape of evolution back to the beginning and replayed it, humans would probably not appear, and nothing would come out the same.

For Dawkins, in comparison to this a galloping determinist, such randomness was anathema. Though never a crude ‘adaptationist’ of the sort Gould ridiculed, the sort who looks for an evolutionary purpose behind everything, Dawkins would still tend to look for the angle. And there are reasons for thinking there are reasons for things. As James Marden, professor of biology at Pennsylvania State University put it, when writing of ‘constructal theory’ in August 2006:

"Our finding that animal locomotion adheres to constructal theory tells us that -- even though you couldn't predict exactly what animals would look like if you started evolution over on earth, or it happened on another planet -- with a given gravity and density of their tissues, the same basic patterns of their design would evolve again,"(From here.)

Thus, for Gould, the world was a matter of sheer luck, for Dawkins, a matter of rules. What made it interesting was that they were both right. But what makes it even more interesting is to reflect how their vastly different approaches manifested themselves when considering the festering problem of religion.

If the world was a random lottery of chance, as Gould saw it, with species doing their best to keep their fingers crossed and fit into whatever niche they could find, then surely one’s only hope was to make the best of a bad lot and accommodate oneself to the world in whatever way one could. Seeing that society was redneck-deep in religious ignorance and superstition, and seeing that the outnumbered forces of reason and science had no realistic prospect of defeating them, then the best survival strategy must surely be to reach an accommodation with them.

Thus the idea of ‘non-overlapping magisteria’, or NOMA. The term ‘magisterium’ is ecclesiastical, meaning ‘area of authority’. The idea was that science had its area of undisputed authority, and religion had its area, and provided that science did not interfere on the priests’ turf and religion didn’t interfere in science, everyone should be happy. Gould was hoping at best for some form of symbiotic equilibrium, which was a faint hope, and also something of an irony. If there was one man alive who was least likely to believe in the viability of long-term equilibrium in anything, it was Gould. Thus, the chief proponent of the idea that such ‘equilibria’ in nature were forever getting themselves ‘punctuated’ to devastating effect (the extinctions, for example) now found himself uncomfortably proposing the very opposite.

Needless to say, Dawkins treated Gould’s notion of NOMA with undisguised derision, branding it the ‘Neville Chamberlain school’ of appeasement (The God Delusion, p. 67). For, argues Dawkins, the religious side would never stick to their side of the partition, partly because beliefs such as the belief in miracles require real-world alterations to the laws of physics, and partly because the canting hypocrites constantly seize and flourish any scrap and gobbet of scientific evidence that appears to support their nutty ideas. But Dawkins doesn’t merely distrust the religious theologians, he actively despises them and refuses to accord their area of ‘authority’ any respect at all. Where Gould appeared to ‘bend over backwards to be polite’, Dawkins retorts: ‘I don’t think we should even throw them a sop’.

Delightful and refreshing as this undoubtedly is for thinking atheists everywhere, others, scientists among them, are bemused by Dawkins’s belligerence. But, unlike Gould, in Dawkins’ world there are rules. And if the world is built on a base of rules, then it follows that there is an optimal or correct structure or order, and a sub-optimal or incorrect structure. Two different structures would be mutually exclusive, and therefore inevitably in conflict, a conflict only resolvable upon the death of one or other of them. It is in consequence an evolutionary directive for incompatible systems to attempt to destroy each other. For Dawkins, if science doesn’t kill religion, religion will surely kill science.

The same argument can be had among socialists, some arguing that religion can be ‘accommodated’, others that it must be destroyed. Not surprisingly, Gould and Dawkins didn’t agree about politics either. Gould was a progressive liberal with socialistic tendencies, not unlike the class-savvy Carl Sagan. Dawkins is a conservative who identifies the processes of capitalist trading as being prefigured in our ‘altruistic’ or ‘dealing’ genes, and whose conception of social history betrays no recognition of the role of class struggle. Thus he celebrates, in The God Delusion, how the ‘zeitgeist’ has changed remarkably, but in the absence of the dynamic of class can offer no explanation for it beyond feeble references to ‘charismatic leaders’ and ‘role-models’. This failure to grasp the real forces of social relationships, more than anything else, is what sidelines Dawkins’ polemic against religion. Gould may have been wrong in trying to compromise, but in his better understanding of the totality of the conflicts in capitalism he had his eye on a much larger picture. For Gould, as for Sagan, the imperative was not mutual ideological destruction, but consensual growth. Put simply, you have to take people with you, or they will desert you. For socialists too, who rely on a consensual understanding to effect socialist change, it’s not just a matter of beating the other guy in the argument. For all his engaging chutzpah, Dawkins is arguably fighting the wrong battle, in the wrong way, in the wrong war.

Paddy Shannon