Clever But Unwise

The Columnists’ Paradox is that the more one writes, the less one need be read. We all have our relatively fixed biases and a reasonably finite store of stories and references, and it does not take too long (longer than my own writing “career” to date though, obviously…) for those to become sufficiently well-known to readers that they can predict with almost perfect accuracy whatever a writer will say.

Danny Finkelstein, to my way of thinking, vanished over the Event Horizon of the Paradox years ago, a couple of seconds to work out the slightly mushy, centre-right, Cameroonian take on any issue saving one the couple of minutes needed to plough through his article on the topic. But a few months back, the Noble Lord managed (briefly) to escape the gravitational pull of predictability and say something interesting.

Writing in The Times before the election about the man whose premiership was then (blessed days!) firmly in the future, he described Keir Starmer as “bright and extremely diligent” before going on to list numerous things he had got wrong. We could expect, he opined, a Prime Minister who “struggles between his immediate reaction, his idealistic view of himself and the dictates of reality.” No matter, “he will often get there in the end.”

If Finkelstein had (briefly as I said) escaped the Columnists’ Paradox, he had done so by inventing one of his own. For I think we would expect those who are “bright and extremely diligent” generally to be right. He appeared to believe that one could be “bright and extremely diligent” and generally, if not habitually, mistaken.

This might seem, on the face of it, straightforwardly wrong. When we test for intelligence, we test an individual’s ability accurately to predict the future – what is the next number in this sequence, what will happen when we rotate this shape in a particular way? Intelligent people should be better than others at foreseeing the outcomes of their actions.

But if, by Finkelstein’s argument, it is in this area that the Prime Minister is lacking, we must admit that he has many of the attributes one would expect of an intelligent person. He went to Oxford (as did many of the Cabinet), he had a successful career at the bar. Anyone looking at his backstory would expect him to be clever. And thus, expect him to be right.

From the point of view of the electorate, being correct is far more important than being clever. Politicians who get things wrong impose a cost on their voters in terms of money (tax-payers’ money, of course), time (as it takes them a while to realise that they need to back out of the cul-de-sac into which they have driven) which could have been spent pursuing the right policy, and, in extreme cases, potentially lives.

How politicians get to the right answer is far less important than that they do so.

If, as Finkelstein argues, intelligence is no guarantee of this in itself, then logically we should stop selecting for it. I am, I admit, an unusual Oxonian in believing that public life would probably be improved by having fewer of my peers (to say nothing of those filthy Tabs…) in it. To any bristling in their college scarf, look around you – you cannot say we’ve done a bang-up job.

Instead of looking for intelligence, we should instead, select for wisdom which includes the notion of being correct. It looks for the right answer while intelligence often contents itself with the plausible answer. The titular hero chooses “wisely” at the end of Indiana Jones and The Holy Grail not just because he has gone through an intellectual process to reach his answer (“that’s the cup of a carpenter”), but because he has chosen the right cup.

How we achieve this is, of course, difficult. Regular readers (the Paradox is coming for me too; I can feel it…) will know of my fondness for Rome’s cursus honorum which forced candidates for high office to have gone through a series of more junior posts across a range of government functions which allowed the voters regularly to pass judgement on their performance. This would, of course, entail a wholesale re-organisation of our public life and would, I think, represent an intolerable encroachment on freedom – anyone should have the right to run for Parliament, no matter their backstory, and the electorate should have the right to vote for those who may not have had the opportunity to display their wisdom. Democracy is after all, the theory that the people know what they want. And deserve to get it good and hard…

If we cannot force politicians to prove their wisdom, we can still ask if they have displayed it in their pre-politics careers, or, failing that, if they approach questions in a manner suggestive of wisdom. For the wise are generally humble, willing to admit there might be more to an issue than they know, or that the facts may change in the future, requiring a different approach. They do not content themselves with the surface of the problem facing them. They go beneath it and beyond it. The Victorians were wise when, living in the biggest city the world had seen, they built larger than necessary sewers as it might get bigger yet. That you do not need to swerve floating faeces when you exit the Tube shows the wisdom of their approach.

It will, of course, be several years before we get to apply this approach, but let us look at the government’s performance to date and ask how wise we think they are. Just before Christmas, an immediate stop to the Latin Excellence Programme was announced. On the face of it, this is not unreasonable – few people outside the Vatican speak it. But it is the basis of many European languages which is useful and, as I have written elsewhere (the Commentator’s Paradox again…) we are not so different from the Ancients that their behaviour does not have lessons for us.

There are more benefits to studying the language than the mere ability to converse with dusty clerics.

 The curriculum is to be “refreshed” because it is “outdated” and does not reflect the “diversities [sic] of our society” (an interesting example of jargon as status-signaller – as “diversity” becomes better known, those in the vanguard must invent a further term to display their position). Again, on the face of it, this is reasonable. What can Shakespeare, for example, have to say to a youth on a Council Estate? Why teach them Tennyson when they could study Tinie Tempah? Or, once more, is there perhaps more to it than that? CLR James was a Trinidadian Marxist, but was still able to see that, “Shakespeare, Rembrandt and Beethoven should matter to all people living in the world today”.

The Chancellor was intelligent enough to realise she had a Black Hole (albeit not intelligent enough, in her public pronouncements at least, to realise this at the same time as everyone else). She was intelligent to read her Treasury spreadsheets and identify money the government could stop giving and money the government could start taking. She was not, however, wise enough to realise that her actions might prompt others to take action, rendering her spreadsheets out of date (the cost of Pension Credit has risen by £400mn since the announcement of the Winter Fuel Allowance cut due to a surge in new claimants).

Nor is it merely in matters of policy that the government displays the mediocrity which knows nothing higher than itself. Its entire approach speaks to the unwise idea that it knows all that can be known, creating a raft of new peers in its own image. Formally a revising chamber, these members will bring no new expertise, insight or perspective. Cookie-cutter politicians and bureaucrats will instead mark the work of other cookie-cutter politicians and bureaucrats suggesting a desire for the better passage of laws, but no desire for the passage of better laws. There can, it seems, be no more things in Heaven and Earth than are dreamt of in the political caste’s philosophy.

The worst, Yeats said, “are full of passionate intensity”. But enough about Rachel Reeves and Bridget Phillipson (two Oxonians who could certainly improve public life by leaving it). If they are at the extreme end of her tribe, they share its defining feature. We know they are clever; we have no reason to believe they are wise and quite a few to believe they are not. And, for the next four years, we’re just going to have to put up with them.

Stewart Slater works in Finance. He invites you to join him at his website.

This piece was first published in Country Squire Magazine, and is reproduced by kind permission.

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