William Davies’ “Nervous States: How feeling took over the world”

Part of the Parlia series on our information ecosystems

William Davies is a political economist who teaches at Goldsmiths.

Go buy this book. Here.

It’s a beautiful overview of the historical and technological revolutions that have driven today’s rising populism.

Here, notes for me to remember what I read.

Intro

The West’s intellectual architecture — the structures and institutions we established to develop, harness and manage knowledge, science and expertise — emerge in response to the particular hell of the Wars of Religion, leaching into Westphalianism.

Our starting point in the 17th Century was that the Mind should rule over the body (Descartes), and that rationalism should be deployed in the service of consensus and peace.

Today, the ‘brain’ is rightly understood as a combination of mind and body. (see Damasio’s Descartes Error). But politically, we have also re-elevated emotion and the subjective over facts, rationalism, and the quest for a consensus over the objective.

Feeling, and the conviction it brings, is on the up.
Experts and expertise are heading down.

Chapter 1— Democracy of Feeling

Gustave Le Bon (a French 19th C doctor) in The Crowd: a study of the popular mind, understands that crowds are particular organisms in their own right. Its emotions, its feelings, its instincts are strikingly different from those of the individual — more violent, more urgent, less deliberative, far more exclusionary.

Today’s tech landscape — ubiquitous media, and the social platforms very particularly — has brought the crowd into every element of public life and the public sphere. This changes the nature of all our interactions, because the crowd is an organism that places feeling above thought. All our institutions, therefore, are under attack.

Chapter 2— Knowledge for Peace

The institutions of knowledge created in the 17th and 18th centuries did not simply establish an approach to enquiry (how to build knowledge), but also a system to report, discuss and disseminate it. All with the goal of creating a basis of consensus that could build peace.

Hobbes imagined an architecture of philosophy, Boyle an architecture of science, but both with the same goal in mind: preserving society, advancing progress, stopping war.

But the technocracy (that convergence of political and scientific authority) which emerged to maintain those standards and systems is now seen to have betrayed its core objectives. We have witnessed a massive upsurge of popular resentment towards its control of not just the facts, but all levers used in response to those facts. Here lies our new-found hatred of the ‘elites’.

Davies writes: “The nativist idea that the nation needs reclaiming from the elites has echoes of the rhetoric of anti-colonial nationalism”… Because when people believe ‘expertise’ is political, trust in the entire edifice of knowledge is shot.

Chapter 3— Progress in Question

Statistics are not good communicators. They’re not only terrible at rendering feeling, or the lived experience, they’re also often deeply obfuscatory.

US: Between 1978–2015, the income of the American population grew by 58%. And that’s the statistic that goes into the papers. What doesn’t, is that the income of the entire bottom half of the population fell by 1% over that same period.

UK: Britain’s economy is the 5th largest in the world, but the majority of regions experience GDP per capita below the entire European average, a statistic that is entirely concealed by the the rebalancing wealth and productivity of London.

Experts and the elite look like the same people, with the same motivations, with nobody but themselves in mind…

Chapter 4 — the Body Politics

The body/mind divide doesn’t exist, as we know. But our understanding of pain hasn’t caught up.

Medicine only focuses on the external, not the psychological / situational / economic. And we’re clearly missing key pieces of the health crisis across the West, since life expectancy is actually dropping both in the UK and US.

Davies shows how pain, loneliness and the absence of a personal story kill people — “deaths of despair” as they’re called in the profession.

“People who are suffering… will go in search of explanations for their feelings. But they will also go in search of recognition for them.”

And he shows how Nationalism narrates pain (important) and provides a narrative of control (much more important).

Chapter 5 — Knowledge for War

Valery Gerasimov, a Russian general, wrote in 2013: ‘“in the twenty-first century we have seen a tendency toward blurring the lines between the states of war and peace.”

Davies believes that state of perpetual proto-war is where we live today.

• We no longer strive for knowledge in a collective spirit for the public good. Knowledge is competitive (my algorithm will kill your algorithm), hoarded, weaponised.
• For that kind of hoarded knowledge to work best, politically and economically, we need to know how it impacts its subjects, the ‘body politic’, the people.
• We know that emotion packs far more of a punch than reason, so we use knowledge to weaponise that emotion.
• Knowledge is downgraded as a virtue in favour of loyalty, trust, and therefore tribalism. A trick Davies first ascribes to Napoleon, greatly admired by Clausewitz.

Chapter 6 — Guessing Games

To free market economists and philosophers — Clausewitz, Ludwig von Mises, Joseph Schumpeter, Friedrich von Hayek — the Entrepreneur is the God Particle that animates the Market. And they represent a very different kind of ideal to the rationalist philosopher-scientist.

The key function of the entrepreneur is that they bring new products and services to life, ensuring the market is always optimising its offering. Their key value as an ideal is that they do so with limited knowledge. Much like a genius general (and the military echoes are explicit), they launch their wars or products armed only with what Hayek called ‘embodied knowledge’ — otherwise known as a hunch.

Extend that thought, as Hayek did, and quickly the only knowledge of value is knowledge that is valuable inside the Market. If the market becomes the matrix upon which we base our lives, who needs actual truth?

“The Market is therefore a type of ‘post-truth’ institution, that saves us from having to know what is going on overall”.

Feeling is the key determinant of how the market moves.

Combined with the furious private hoarding of knowledge, we begin to justify the blending of the pursuits of wealth, power and truth…

Chapter 7 — War of Words

The internet platforms seek to ensure all forms of communication take place upon their networks. They want to own our thoughts. More, they want to own the fabric of existence. When so much power concentrates in such few places, the not only does the threat of violence increase (back to Le Bon and the behaviour of crowds), but so does its potential destructiveness.

Chapter 8 — Between War and Peace

Davies’ conclusion reminds me of Chantal Mouffe’s call for a new Leftist Populism.

Life has changed, radically, over the last generation. Opportunities have diminished for the majority of Western populations. Deep resentment and a sense of pervading and accelerating injustice makes sense. But the Right doesn’t need to win those feelings.

Davies argues that we need a radical, populist reform agenda, bringing science back into the moral sphere, understanding the causes of nationalist resurgence, reining in the Libertarianism of Silicon Valley (great line here: “Libertarian dreams ultimately mean divorcing scientific from social progress”), all to build a new kind of social contract that is wholly inclusive (“free school meals for all”) and international.

Imagine we are at war, Davies asks, because he argues we have been and we are. How, today, would we design the kind of post-war settlement we saw after 1945? Because that is what Davies thinks we need.

And he thinks Climate Change gives us the ultimate (because existential) cause.

Again: go buy his book!
https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/1114367/nervous-states/9781784707033.html