They Don't Care.

And they lie to themselves.

There have been political and ideological systems in history that sought to dictate popular understandings of truth and knowledge; there have been systems that have fought violently over the meaning and control of both of them, and more recently there have been systems of thought that deny that either can really be said to exist objectively. But I think that ours is the first society in history where the ruling classes genuinely don’t care about truth and knowledge, and so don’t give either much importance. They are not actively hostile to either truth or knowledge: they just haven’t found either to be particularly useful or necessary in their own lives and careers. They are happy—indeed eager—to make use of them for political advantage, and to pretend to take them seriously for tactical purposes, but no more. This is an extraordinary state of affairs, and here I discuss how it arose, how it manifests itself today and what the potential consequences may be.

These ideas had been vaguely circulating at the back of my mind for a while, but they were brought into focus by the bizarre and almost unbelievable case of the late Jason Arday, the confidence trickster who secured a Chair at the University of Cambridge before being revealed as a liar, a cheat, a plagiarist and fantasist who probably needed treatment. I’m not going to go into the details of that case, except incidentally, but I will just observe that if anything can said to conveniently encapsulate the intellectual and moral depths to which the western ruling class has fallen, then this sordid farce must be a good candidate. It may also, finally, signal the point at which our rulers’ embarrassment (since they are incapable of shame) forces them to do something verging upon the sensible.

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Very briefly, Arday, the youngest Black full Professor in the history of Cambridge claimed to be born autistic, not to be able to speak until about the age of about ten (the details vary) or able to write until the age of eighteen. Somehow he went on to a dazzling academic career including a Doctorate, with visiting fellowships at other universities, and he was an international athlete and an ultra-marathon runner. Oh, and he raised millions of pounds for charities and appeared a lot on TV. Again, many of these details changed over the weeks : their only common features are that they are either lies, or cannot be verified, or there are severe doubts (as with his Doctorate) about whether they were actually honestly gained. Arday has now resigned, both from his job and from life itself, but it’s not clear whether he actually thought he’d even done anything wrong: after all, if there are no objective standards of truth or knowledge, and if the accusations against him were, as he suggested, just a “discourse,” then he had nothing to be ashamed of because nothing he had done was objectively real. (And I wonder whether his suicide, after being found out as eventually he was going to be, wasn’t a last desperate attempt to control the future discourse.)

When I first heard about story this I honestly thought it was a joke. I could understand why others thought that Arday would reveal himself as a right-wing prankster out to destroy woke. But no, the story is unhappily real. However, I’m less concerned with this curious individual, than with the social and intellectual decline that made his success possible and, most of all, caused an ancient and quite well-known university to select him, and then to defend him ferociously; not on grounds of truth or knowledge, but by claiming he was a vulnerable individual assailed by racist conspiracies. I declare an interest here: for a very large part of the last fifty-odd years, I have been involved with universities in various countries in different ways, as well as teaching professional students outside a university framework. I have also worked in and for institutions of different types, in and out of government and the academic world. I have a little knowledge of these things, therefore, and so I have been following this squalid affair with professional interest, as well as with the hypnotised fascination of someone unable to look away from a developing slow-motion car-crash.

How did we wind up here? Well as “Dr” Arday would no doubt say, it all depends what you mean by “here,” or indeed what you mean by “mean,” since these are socially constructed terms, or something. But what I mean is that we have arrived at a situation where you can exercise power and authority, and have influence and demand respect, without the need to have any knowledge of things you are responsible for, to tell the truth about what you do know, or even to regard the search for truth itself as a justifiable and important pursuit. As in Orwell’s 1984, truth is asserted, and knowledge is dictated, rather than either being sought, which is easier and quicker, and much less work all round.

Now I’m the first to admit that it’s wrong, and probably dangerous, to assume that “truth” and “knowledge” are straightforward concepts. There’s quite a lot of debate about how we understand them, and indeed entire fields of philosophy are tended by philosophers arguing viciously among themselves about such things. But in everyday life, it has been customary to believe that we should seek the truth about something as far as possible, just as we should seek to acquire knowledge as far as we can, without pretending to godlike wisdom in either case. After all, it can be positively dangerous to follow and imitate people who claim to have this wisdom. (Ironically, even mystics who claim direct knowledge of such things generally turn out to have had quite different experiences.) But just because ultimate truth may be unattainable, and knowledge may come in different flavours with different rules, does not mean that we should simply give up and accept anything and everything that comes along. Indeed, life would be impossible if everybody behaved like the University of Cambridge.

But the origins of this problem lie, I think, not with Foucault or Derrida (though I’ll touch on them briefly) but with something very different: theories developed by right-wing economists in the 1960s and 1970s. When I was studying Economics, the subject was a bit like engineering: mainly descriptive and analytic, telling you how to do things, and what happened when you pushed different buttons. For years, economists on the fringes had been trying to persuade governments that inflation could be controlled by changes in interest rates. Putting rates up, they claimed, would (theoretically) reduce the demand for money, so that inflation would go down, at least for some values of “inflation,” and some types of interest rates. Inflation was a huge problem in the 1970s as a result of the 1973 oil price shock, and, whilst it was falling substantially by the end of the decade, the Tory government that came to power in 1979 was obsessed with inflation as a threat, and brought these ideas blinking out of the shadows and applied them. Now in practice, the result was a disaster: high interest rates pushed the Pound up and made exports un-competitive, companies went out of business, unemployment doubled, and, ironically, inflation shot up again as high interest rates increased costs. Whoops. But what’s important here is that this is the first known sighting of the idea that knowledge and truth were something to be imposed by fiat, not sought. There was no supporting evidence whatever for the hypothesis linking inflation and interest rates, but those involved didn’t care. The theory was by definition right because it was intellectually persuasive to them, and indeed it continues to have an influence even today.

As economies became more and more virtual, as production of practically everything was outsourced to China, and everything became financialised, statistics became steadily more ethereal. Once, the economic news would be about the balance of payments, the strength of sterling or the rate of unemployment and changes in industrial production. These were all real things that you could in principle measure, and had real effects on peoples’ lives. But now the powers that be have decided that they don’t care about such things and the practical effects on peoples’ lives. Indeed, they don’t care about the real world at all, the world in which we live. This became clear to many people for the first time in the 2008 economic crash, where an astonished public discovered that most of the wealth that was supposed to exist actually didn’t, and that for years clever bankers had been selling sliced-up underperforming mortgages to each other, which were actually worth nothing. Yet if anything, the problem has become worse, with the financialisation of financialisation itself, where the ruling class simply doesn’t care about the real world, but works itself into lathers about futures prices of barrels of oil, and how low they can get them so they can sell them at a profit later. No matter how often they are told that you can’t buy and sell things that don’t exist, they don’t understand and anyway they don’t care.

Of course, this is part of a wider tendency to live in an Ideal world, where truth and knowledge are optional, and where reality is what we say it is. I amused myself once by making some simple calculations of how many Patriot missiles would have been expended by Ukraine if their claims of numbers of Russian missiles destroyed were true. Making some conservative assumptions, it was nonetheless clear that reasonably quickly Ukraine would have had to have fired more Patriot missiles than actually existed in the world. Our leaders know this, but they don’t care. Or more simply they don’t care what the truth is, and don’t see why they should be put to the inconvenience of finding out. They know what the truth is supposed to be, and that’s enough.

Our political class and the Professional and Managerial Caste (PMC) that serves it, have been bought up in a largely virtual world, and now inhabit one that is almost entirely so. It’s notorious that few of our leaders have ever trained as scientists and engineers: increasingly, they study the kinds of amorphous non-subjects that “Dr” Arday would have taught if there was any evidence that he had ever taught a class. They study subjects which begin from conclusions rather than seeking them, and which are about finding, or even just assuming, evidence for norms that are already accepted. It all makes medieval debates between Realists and Nominalists seem gritty and banally practical by comparison. Consequently, political questions today are about management, presentation and image: they are almost never about reality. Traditional “knowledge” is often unwelcome, and frequently dangerous. Rather, knowledge today is derived from norms, and norms are enforced by power, just like the deconstructionists said, although probably not in the way they expected. Truths are normative truths, not pragmatic ones. Thus, Immigration is a Good Thing, costs and practical difficulties do not exist, and anyone who draws attention to them is a fascist. Thus also, entire institutions, in some weird Idealistic sense, are declared inherently “racist” or “sexist.” This is not a judgement about actions of individuals or even groups, but a judgement about the Idealist essence of vaguely defined entities which in fact are changing an evolving all the time. Since the essence of such institutions is decided in advance and can be taken for granted, any search for actual knowledge abut how they operate is unnecessary: critics just don’t care.

Now I have pointed out before that if this PMC normative ideology were coherent, then at least it could be evaluated and criticised usefully. But not only is it incoherent and contradictory, it is the uneasy and contorted product of vicious infighting between factions that hate each other, and seek priority and support for their own particular grievance. Experienced practitioners can thus slide smoothly between entirely conflicting available discourses, depending on which one suits their argument of the moment. So in the space of five minutes, a feminist may argue successively that (1) we should always believe what women say (2) women’s statements are completely determined for them by the patriarchy and (3) there is no objective truth anyway, depending on the question.

A few paragraphs back, I used the word “essence.” That might strike a faint chord somewhere. It was, of course, Sartre’s argument that there are no inherent essences, that we construct our own essence through our behaviour. Indeed, Sartre argued, as I have discussed elsewhere at some length, that we are not only free to construct our own essence, but that we are “condemned to be free,” obliged to find an identity, and a meaning and purpose in life. We are free whether we accept the fact or not. We can hide from choices and we can pretend they do not exist, but in that case we are guilty of what he calls mauvaise foi, or “bad faith.” This does not mean lying to others (though it may include that): it means lying to ourselves, and that is the greatest sin in Sartre’s secular theology. We pretend that we don’t have choices, when what we mean is that we lack the courage to identify and implement them. “Hell is other people,” said Sartre famously, meaning that we live in a symbolic Hell, where what other people think and do determines our own thoughts and actions, leading us to deny the reality of our own freedom. (Curiously, this reminds me of C S Lewis’s remark that the only people who are in the Christian Hell are those that want to be there. In both cases, they are incapable of change.)

You can see why Sartre, once the darling of the intellectuals, is now in such disfavour, and his philosophy is so little valued today. Because the fundamental message of all fashionable thinking for the last fifty years has been precisely that we are not free. That we are completely surrounded by ever-more subtle webs of control and domination. That apparent freedom is just a subtle form of slavery. That we are never more controlled than when we think that we are free: it is the last illusion and the most powerful. So whereas Sartre argued bleakly that we have choices and we are responsible for them and their consequences, today’s consensus is that we have no choices, and so cannot be held responsible for anything we do or don’t do. And thus it has been possible to present “Dr” Arday, albeit with difficulty, as a victim and not a transgressor, because in the end he had no choice did he? And in a weird sense I think this is partly true: he may have been a con-man, but in fact he had very little choice about how to behave if he wanted to succeed, and he went passively along with what was expected of him Had his claims been less varied and outrageous, he would have no doubt been pushed aside by someone with a life-story (or “personal narrative”) containing even more unbelievable but still compulsory elements.

Believability is the point here. The reality of course is that we do have choices: Foucault could have refused to sign the 1977 petition calling for the legalisation of pedophilia, but he did sign it, though whether out of conviction or cowardice will probably never be known. And to be fair, Sartre himself, although generally a reliable megaphone for Moscow, did summon up the courage to condemn the suppression of the 1956 Hungarian uprising. But the point, of course, is that we are dealing here with the Hell of Other People. Few of our choices are made in isolation, and we spend much of our time wondering what others will believe about what we think and say. Quite a few of the signatories of the 1977 petition (who included Sartre himself), probably had misgivings, but the whole thing was a collective exercise in Bad Faith, where nobody wanted to be conspicuously absent from a cause everyone else was supporting.

In such situations of collective Bad Faith, believability is not a question of respecting established truth, nor does it depend on knowledge demonstrated by the person who wishes to be believed. It depends on how well that person conforms to the expectations of the target group, and how well he or she reproduces the Bad Faith of the target group in themselves. Indeed, the worst thing you can do is to stop lying to yourself and point up the Bad Faith of a group, especially one you want to join, because in that case you also threaten the very collective ego of your prospective colleagues. After all, it is possible for a group to believe effectively anything, and anyone, provided that, by unspoken agreement, they all lie to themselves.

To return to Arday for a second, he was awarded a Doctorate by Liverpool John Moore’s University, (previously Liverpool Polytechnic teaching trade-related skills), named after a pioneer of sports betting in the UK. A couple of things are clear. One is that he was pretty much unsupervised (it is alleged that he saw his supervisor only once), and the other is that he copied and plagiarised most of his work. It’s astounding that he was awarded his degree in the first place, but it’s actually beyond debate that he indeed copied and plagiarised, and that the university authorities knew about it, but didn’t care.

A curiosity, and the irony of the situation here is that the “knowledge” involved here is about as close to certain knowledge as you can find. It’s not a matter of opinion, of “discourse” or “standpoint”, any more than the air temperature is. These are not “allegations.” There is no “controversy.” Those familiar already with Higher Education practices can skip the next few sentences if they like, but basically the Internet has both created enormous ethical problems in universities, and also provided some means of addressing them. The problems result from the ease of finding somebody else’s work, and passing it off as your own. The further you go in your studies, the more serious the problem is, because the more your work should be original and a genuine contribution to knowledge. The Internet makes it absurdly easy to cut and paste material from other authors (or even other students) into your work and to present it as your own.

However, there are now Internet sites through which students can be instructed to submit their work, and which have an excellent record of detecting plagiarism. Arday’s work was apparently submitted to the Anglo-Saxon site known as Turnitin (there is a European equivalent called Urkund, although the two are merging.) These sites run a search, and produce a Similarity Index (SI) for each submission, flagging up extracts which directly resemble other identified texts, thus enabling the examiner to make word-for-word comparisons. In most subjects, there will be some similarities, if only because standard bibliographies and the use of common citations and a common vocabulary will produce an SI higher than zero. For the sort of subjects I’ve taught over the years, an SI of 10% isn’t necessarily a problem. Over 15% could be a problem, and if I see an SI of over 20% my heart sinks, because it means that at a minimum the student hasn’t produced work that is original enough. The risk is always, at best, of an argument held together with long quotations from other people.

But it could also indicate plagiarism, whether in large blocks or scattered sentences, and it can sometimes take a while to work out what is going on, and then to decide—always with others—what to do about it. Now Arday would have known this: he couldn’t not have known it. He knew that if his work was submitted to Turnitin it would show he had cheated; he knew he had committed plagiarism and he didn’t care. He knew the plagiarism would then be spotted and he didn’t care. The University learned about the plagiarism, but they didn’t care. They gave him the degree anyway, although the basic research, if you can call it that, seems to have been copied wholesale from another thesis, and the handful of interviews that constituted the “fieldwork,” seem never to have taken place. But they didn’t care. At this point, if you’re anything like me and did a real Doctorate involving years of research, you may want to leave the room to throw up.

But actually, that’s not the worst. Cambridge University, which after all is quite a well-known institution, appointed him unanimously, in spite of the plagiarism episode, and an autobiographical presentation some of which was impossible and much of which would have disintegrated after a few Internet checks. But they didn’t care. They have since said that because the plagiarism took place at another university, they didn’t take any notice of it, because they didn’t care. (Can you imagine a charity working with children enthusiastically employing someone who’d already served a suspended prion sentence for child molestation?) One reason they didn’t care is that for the most part they weren’t real academics, but people with the kind of titles you probably thought were jokes, along the lines of, Senior Deputy Vice-Principal for Stopping Students Failing Examinations. Even the academics, from what’s been published, had chairs in subjects which most of us had no idea existed, let alone thought were worth actually studying. So they just didn’t care about academic standards. Their names have been published, and I hope they now feel ashamed.

Although the case has been associated with wokery, I believe, as I said at the start, that it goes well beyond that. Indeed, it even goes beyond education. In a society of what I have called facsimiles, where there is no difference between the appearance and the reality save that the appearance is easier and cheaper, the presiding ideology is collective Bad Faith. Everybody agrees to pretend that education, training, qualifications and experience mean something. People pretend to have them, institutions pretend to confer them, teachers pretend to teach them, society pretends to recognise them. Everyone is lying to themselves because in the end they don’t care. And for a surprisingly long time, a society can more-or-less function in this way. Everything that requires actual knowledge can be outsourced, and truth can be whatever power says it is. This, I am sure, is one of the main attraction of “AI.” Like some obsequious genie from the past, it will produce, in connected and superficially reasonable prose, whatever argument you want confirmed. (“Tell me why Russia will lose the war in Ukraine.”) Imagine the attractions of a world where we don’t actually have to know anything about anything, and “AI”will do all our thinking and arguing for us.

Ironically, if there is one area of society where such intellectual sins should have been fought most furiously, it is the University: the opposite as we know, has been the case. The problem with basic knowledge, or understanding, or discovery, is that they have no physical and tangible results, other than publications. In itself, Analytical Philosophy, for example, doesn’t change anything, whereas quantum physics does. In the longer term, as here, changes in philosophical norms can have real-world consequences, but you can never say whether they are “right” or “wrong” as shown by experiments (as you can with quantum physics) or pragmatic examples such as machinery working as designed. In some subjects, the argument has been taken further, in the judgement that the only truth is subjective truth (which judgement of course is itself only a subjective truth) and that therefore the “facts” with which science and technology, but also history and geography, have traditionally dealt, change with the standpoint of those pronouncing them. So because one of “Dr” Arday’s critics was a right-wing controversialist, the “facts” he quoted, which you or I might consider to be objective, were in reality subjective only.

But as I say, this isn’t limited to the universities. One of the curious things about our modern society is the general lack of interest in pragmatic knowledge and experience, to the greater benefit of power-respecting truth. In the past, on various Internet sites under different names and in person, I would sometimes respond to arguments by saying “have you read the new book by X on Y?” or “well, I was there last year and what I found was …” It took me some time to realise that my interlocutors didn’t care about such things. They had their own beliefs, shaped by the power dynamics of whichever formal or informal group they belonged to, and knowledge and truth were potential threats to the collective Bad Faith of the group, and to themselves. I’ve been told, effectively, “you may know the country and I don’t, or you may have made a specialist study of the subject and I haven’t, but I have the right opinions, and you don’t.” Of course, people have been stuck in received opinions throughout history, and often reluctant to change them, but ours is the first modern society, I think, where a priori normative truths about things are actually given a higher epistemological status than mere knowledge and experience, and I find that worrying.

One of the most important if underreported aspects of this sordid tale is that most of it took place at Cambridge. Now I did say that the University is quite well known, although I come from the bolshy generation of students from ordinary homes who thought that “Oxbridge” was a bit of a joke. You’d hear that Oxford was a finishing school where rich parents sent their kids, and that Cambridge was that place in the marshes where the KGB recruited traitors. Notwithstanding, Cambridge occupies a fundamental place in the heart of the British Establishment, and to be blunt, nobody would have paid much attention to a similar scandal at the University of Dewsbury. But this is the University the British King attended, as well as a large proportion of the ruling class.

In the past, the British Government maintained a list of names known, with typically British semi-irony as the Great and the Good. From this list, would be selected people who had, or were still having, distinguished careers in areas of public interest. You’d find a heterogeneous list, including retired civil servants and ambassadors, serving or retired judges, Church dignitaries, retired Generals, a few people from the City and the private sector in the old days, and of course a large number of distinguished academics. So you knew who turn to if you needed members of a committee, someone to chair an enquiry, someone to take over the running of a troubled organisation. Who had, if you like, a measure of seriousness and competence. I can’t imagine that such a list exists now, and if it did, it wouldn’t contain the names of the kind of people with non-jobs who nodded through the appointment of “Dr” Arday. This whole business is a kick in the sensitive parts of the anatomy to the British Establishment, not least because the non-Great and the non-Good of the University mishandled the whole affair in a way that’s so unprofessional it frightens me.

Now recall that the alleged misdeeds were not “allegations” but a factual record of cheating, supported by statistics. In other words, the situation could only get worse, and what you do in such cases is to cut your losses as soon as possible. You issue an anodyne statement saying something like “the university is aware of the allegations. We take all such allegations seriously and are looking into them. In the meantime, it would not be useful to comment further.” Bang. Door closed, and with a bit of luck the controversy will die down or can at least be contained. Instead, they didn’t engage with the issues at all but launched a bizarre counter-attack, accusing critics of “vile” and “racist” prejudice, sounding like a little child caught with their hand in the sweet jar, and to top it all they spent a lot of money employing libel lawyers. Such a strategy, be it noted, stood absolutely no chance of success in the face of the quantitative evidence. But I think they didn’t care. They were fighting a symbolic Hegelian battle in the world of ideas, not dealing with a practical political problem that threatened to derail the University.

And now it has, and nobody can have faith any more, not just in the university system but in the society that it represents and expresses. Already, the Bad Faith excuses are out. “Everybody does it.” No, everybody doesn’t do it, and it’s an insult to suggest otherwise. If they did, it would be a terrifying conclusion about the intellectual probity of British, and probably western universities. “He was destroyed by the media.” No, he lived by the media, and eventually died by the media. Above all, of course, he was “not responsible” for his choices or his fate. Except he was, like all of us. Like all tricksters, he eventually ran out of road, and there were no more excuses. In a certain very limited sense, I suppose, you could say he was a victim, or at least a lesser perpetrator. I remarked a few weeks ago, before this scandal burst upon us, that the western university system was broken. I think this case shows that judgement to be true, and the neoliberal revolution that has progressively broken it is devouring its children, right on schedule. The university system as it now is positively encourages poseurs and hucksters and con artists and attractive individuals with beaming smiles and not a lot of brainpower. This is what you get, when this is what you need to do to get ahead.

But all this is the natural result of a ruling class that doesn’t care about education, that doesn’t care about the future of young people, that doesn’t care about truth and knowledge, that doesn’t care about anything but its own careers, it’s own image and it’s own perpetuation. To safeguard those, it cares about the Discourse, and the control of that Discourse, and we can be pretty sure that a lot of effort is going on now, not into resolving real problems, but into ensuring that the Discourse is maintained. So Arday will be posthumously sanctified, a victim of a racist media almost as obsessed with him as he was with himself, a victim whose allegedly terrible early life meant that it was wrong to hold him to the normal, tedious, standards of truth and probity expected in academia, a victim because thousands of White academics do the same thing all the time and are never investigated. Truth is racist. Meanwhile, threats of legal action against critics.

I don’t know. So amateurish has been the University’s response so far, so incompetent the behaviour of its inexperienced management team, that I rather suspect they will only make things worse. Do they give him an official funeral, with readings from Franz Fanon and Stokely Carmichael? Do they declare three days of official mourning? Do they ban expressions of criticism and take disciplinary action against those who utter them? Who can say whether a limited amount of common sense will eventually prevail?

Because in the end, Discourse cannot save the world. The university system, like much else in the western system, is broken. Forbidding discussion of something doesn’t actually make it go away, as we ought to learn when we become adults. Groups can lie to themselves but they cannot ultimately change reality by so doing. At some point, if nothing serious is done, reality will punch these people in the face. Staff morale will plunge and good people will leave where they can. Students will stop coming. The public image of a very ancient institution will be irreparably damaged, and take the wider image of the university system as a whole with it. Try Discoursing your way out of that one.

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That’s all for this week. As always, thanks to others who tirelessly supply translation in their languages. Maria José Tormo is posting Spanish translations on her site here, and Marco Zeloni is also posting Italian translations on a site here, and Italia e il Mondo is posting them here. I’m pleased to add that versions of these essays in Czech will now be appearing regularly in translation on the site czstrat.cz. I am always grateful to those who post occasional translations and summaries into other languages just as long as you credit the original and let me know.