Category: Bryan Greetham

Obituary: Bryan Greetham, teacher, writer and thinker

By Pat Rowe

Bryan Greetham (1946-2022) the writer and thinker, died on Sunday 26th June in Estepona, Spain. Above all, Bryan wanted to help students of all ages be the best thinkers possible.

Bryan was born in Faversham, Kent. He failed the 11 plus exam and went to a secondary modern school. But this didn’t hold him back. He pushed to take his A’ Levels and got a place to read History at the University of Kent. Then he took an MA in Intellectual History at the University of Sussex. He was awarded a PhD, in moral philosophy by the University of Newcastle of New South Wales, Australia when he was in his 50s. He was an honorary fellow at the University of Durham.

Bryan loved teaching and was always happy to help any of his students. It was for them he started writing and had just finished the fifth edition of his first book, How to Write Better Essays, when he died. Some of Bryan’s more recent books focused on techniques to develop the art of thinking itself: Smart Thinking and Thinking Skills for Professionals.

Helen Caunce, Bryan’s editor at Palgrave:

“he demonstrated intellectual curiosity, consideration, astute judgement and – above all else – genuine warmth and kindness. There really is no-one I’ve enjoyed working with more in my publishing career. Bryan’s books will continue to represent the very best of study skills publishing: his work stems from a keenly felt desire to make the experience of studying at university more accessible – to make the ‘rules of the game’ clear – particularly for those coming from a less privileged background. I feel very fortunate to have had the opportunity to commission so many of these inspirational books.”

Bryan had almost finished a novel about the moral dilemmas facing people in the Second World War but it will remain uncompleted.

I hope he will be remembered for his books and for the passion with which he taught his students and tried to help all those who bought them and later contacted him. As well as philosophy, which he loved, he also taught history and politics. Bryan was always curious about our world, constantly reading, writing and questioning our origins, our existence and our future..

Bryan Greetham was a generous contributor to Ars Notoria. Phil Hall, its founding editor, said:

Reading Bryan Greetham’s book resulted in an intellectual epiphany. Despite the fact that I thought hard and studied for so long, after I came across Bryan Greetham’s books, I realized that my thought processes were neither clear nor profound. Bryan’s book dispersed my mental fog, and it was important to incorporate his ideas into my classes at all the different universities and colleges I worked at in the UK and abroad. Bryan opened his students’ (and his friends’) intellectual horizons. His ideas were transformative. He was a great humane thinker and socialist and if everyone was able to think the way he suggested we think we would be living in a much better world, not in this strange infra-mundo.

Bryan wasn’t just an academic, though. He loved cycling and music. Cream, Fleetwood Mac and Led Zeppelin were some of his favourites. He supported his beloved Newcastle United FC, and he had many other interests that filled his life. Early on in his life, Bryan played piano and sang in a church choir. He played tennis, cricket, rugby and football, and he loved swimming.

After the UK, we lived in Portugal. Together, Bryan and I started an international college. After Portugal we moved to Australia. Then we lived in France and finally in Spain. But Bryan always loved Kent and that is where I will take his ashes.

Although he was not traditionally religious in adult life, Bryan had strong spiritual beliefs of his own, so maybe he has taken a Stairway to Heaven, to his own idea of heaven. I hope so.

Bryan wanted to feel he had done something good and useful. I know from all the messages he received over the years that he achieved this.

A toast to Bryan.

Opposition to Avi Loeb’s unbiased, empirical inquiry

                      

Critical and logical thinking is not genuine Smart Thinking, it is merely a form of computation

By Bryan Greetham

In the film Free Guy a bank teller discovers he is actually just a character in a video game. This forms the basis of a question that many have asked. From Descartes ‘evil demon’, to Hilary Putnam’s ‘Brain in a Vat’ and the film The Matrix, all of them pose the same question: are you a real person living in a concrete reality or do you just inhabit an elaborate computer simulation, the product of programmers, who are able to control your every thought and sense experience?

However, despite the sinister implications of this, many of us are all too willing to hand over our minds in the same way to malicious programmers whose only aim is to control our thoughts for their own advantage. We live in an attention economy, where the most coveted product on any website is ‘click bait’ that draws and captures inattentive minds long enough to sell advertising space. People spend hours every day, whether they are standing at bus stops, walking in the streets or having lunch in cafes, just staring into screens. Aldous Huxley said, ‘Most of one’s life…is one prolonged effort to prevent oneself thinking.’1

In one study, subjects were asked to sit in a chair and do nothing but think. So difficult did some people find it to be alone with their own thoughts that, just to break the tedium, they took the opportunity to give themselves mild electric shocks, which they had earlier said they would pay to avoid. Of the men two-thirds gave themselves painful jolts during a 15 minute spell of solitude. One gave himself 190 shocks. Of the women a quarter gave themselves shocks. In 11 separate studies researchers found that people hated being left to think, regardless of age, education, income or the amount they use smartphones or social media.

acquiring knowledge or thinking logically can be done passively, almost as if the thinking part of you is not there

But what actually amounts to genuine thinking? Jacob Bronowski, who worked with John von Neumann, the creator of game theory, once suggested to von Neumann, during a taxi ride in London, that chess is a good example of a game. Von Neumann responded, ‘No, no … chess is not a game. Chess is a well-defined form of computation.’2 And this is exactly what is so much that passes as thinking in our use of the term. Critical and logical thinking, for example, is not so much thinking, but a form of computation. If you work according to the rules and follow the right procedure, you will arrive at the right answer.

Compare that with genuine, smart thinking. In this there is a dynamic component. To say that you are thinking means that you are actively processing ideas, whereas acquiring knowledge or thinking logically can be done passively, almost as if the thinking part of you is not there. Otto Frisch, who worked with the Nobel Prize winning physicist Niels Bohr, explained that Bohr never trusted a purely logical argument: ‘“No, no,” he would say, “You are not thinking; you are just being logical.”’3 Thinking means going beyond what you know, or what you can show logically, to discover something new.

Genuine thinking starts with the epistemological assumption that right answers are designed, not found by just following the rules.

Genuine thinking starts with the epistemological assumption that right answers are designed, not found by just following the rules. It is all about generating new ideas, creating new concepts, designing novel solutions to problems and producing new insights. What we know is shaped by the act of knowing. It is not out there just waiting to be discovered. This has surprising implications. Much of science involves what Kuhn describes as ‘normal science’, where a paradigm is accepted and scientists are merely working out the details. It is a form of computation: nothing new is being discovered that isn’t already predicted by the paradigm.

In 2017, there appeared in the sky ‘Oumuamua’, what Avi Loeb describes as an interstellar object that was briefly visiting our solar system. In July 2021 the Galileo Project was publicly announced declaring that humans can no longer ignore the possible existence of Extraterrestrial Technological Civilizations, and that science should not dogmatically reject potential extraterrestrial explanations because of social stigma or cultural preferences, factors which are not conducive to the scientific method of unbiased, empirical inquiry. For good reason this project was named after Galileo: its aim is to think as genuine thinkers and go beyond what we know.

What we know is shaped by the act of knowing. It is not out there just waiting to be discovered.

Beyond scientific theory this has implications for all those whose thinking has been systematically taken over by what they read on social media. Locked within their own universe of facts and self-reinforcing arguments, they are intellectually insulated from any evidence that might threaten what they believe. It even applies, perhaps more widely, to all those who are committed to political ideologies.

These, too, are engaged in mere computation, applying what they consider to be self-evident rules and principles that determine what they consider to be relevant and true. In such a world communication is no longer possible, because there is no shared reality; each person has retreated into their own safe world of predictable computation. They lack the abiding qualities of all genuine thinkers: pragmatism, an open mind, the ability to set aside what they would like to believe, play devil’s advocate, ask naïve questions, generate new ideas, create new concepts, and design solutions to the most perplexing problems.

As with the resistance to Avi Loeb’s hypothesis of an interstellar visitor, there is no room for the unexpected, the radical hypothesis or the hitherto inconceivable connections between ideas, like those Einstein made between mass and energy. After all, you aren’t thinking, you’re just engaged in a form of computation. Perhaps the ability to think freely, pragmatically, free from the structured certainties of a political ideology, cultural influences or a ruling scientific paradigm, is the ultimate freedom we have. As Immanuel Kant said ‘Dare to know’4, dare to have the courage to think for yourself. 

1 Huxley, Aldous, ‘Green Tunnels’ in Mortal Coils (1922) (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1955), p. 114.

2 Poundstone, William, Prisoner’s Dilemma (New York: Doubleday, 1992), p. 6.   

3 Frisch, O.R., What Little I Remember (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), p. 92.

4 Kant, Immanuel, ‘Answering the Question: What is Enlightenment?’, Berlinische Monatsschrift, December 1784, pp. 481-94.

Bryan Greetham was born in Faversham, Kent, in England. He was educated at the University of Kent, where he gained a BA Hons in History, and at the University of Sussex, where he completed his MA in Intellectual History. He was awarded his PhD at the University of Newcastle in Australia for his work in moral thinking.

Bryan is the author of How to Write Better Essays, How to Write your Undergraduate Dissertation, both on writing and thinking skills, Philosophy, an introduction to philosophy for undergraduates, Thinking Skills for Professionals and his latest book, Smart Thinking, all published by Palgrave, Macmillan.

Escaping the Monkey Trap

By Bryan Greetham.

We are busy producing a generation of the most sophisticated recyclers of received opinion

In Robert Pirsig’s best-selling book, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, he describes ‘the old South Indian Monkey Trap’, which consists of a coconut, which has been hollowed out and chained to a stake. Inside there is some rice, which can be grabbed by reaching for it through a small hole. The hole is large enough to allow the monkey’s hand to go through, but too small for him to take his clenched fist back out once he has grabbed the rice. He’s suddenly trapped, not by anything physical, but by an idea. The principle ‘when you see rice, hold on tight’ has served him well, but has now turned against him.

We also find ourselves trapped by our ideas in exactly the same way. We struggle to accept climate change, because we are trapped by a certain idea of progress, which we can’t let go even though it has turned against us. As John Maynard Keynes put it, ‘The difficulty lies not in the new ideas, but in escaping from the old ones.’1 We are all conventional thinkers trapped by our intuitions and routine patterns of thought.

In the 1990s and 2000s companies in the banking sector were successful through their acquisitions. Buy an underperforming company on the cheap, ruthlessly strip it of costs and you create value with a more successful company that produces the level of profits that shareholders are looking for. Yet in 2008 following the same established principle the directors of the Royal Bank of Scotland paid £48bn for parts of the Dutch bank ABN Amro and not only wrecked RBS, but threatened to bring down the whole of the British banking system.

Brown declared that, as a result of the ingenuity and creativity of bankers, ‘A new world order has been created’: we have the privilege of living in ‘an era that history will record as the beginning of a new Golden Age’.

And it wasn’t as if this was an impetuous decision by the RBS board, which they regretted at leisure. They met to discuss it 18 times and still the directors were unanimous that the deal should go through. Like the trapped monkey, they relied on established patterns of expectations and applied a principle that had served them well, instead of analysing the evidence and taking a different course.

modern education systems are designed to teach students what to think, not how to think.

Yet they weren’t the only ones who failed to see what was coming. On the eve of the financial crash, neither the Prime Minister Gordon Brown, nor the opposition leader David Cameron, had any suspicions of what was about to happen. Gordon Brown declared that, as a result of the ingenuity and creativity of bankers, ‘A new world order has been created’: we have the privilege of living in ‘an era that history will record as the beginning of a new Golden Age’.

Similarly, at the time when there were clear signs that the banking system was in trouble David Cameron was confidently declaring that, largely as a result of the bankers’ efforts, a new world economy had been created. The Left’s misguided belief in regulation had been thoroughly discredited, he claimed, ‘Liberalism’ had prevailed and the world economy was now more stable than for a generation.

Even those with the expertise to predict it, failed to see what was coming on the eve of the crash, when there were obvious signs of what was about to happen. Recently the Bank of England released the minutes of their meetings before the crash, which revealed that they had no idea what was about to happen.

As this shows, we are all trapped by ideas and unexamined intuitions, even when it’s clear we are struggling to solve a problem and ought to find other ways of thinking. Over millions of years we have adapted to our environment to become routine, unreflective thinkers. For much of our existence our survival has depended on rules and patterns of behaviour well-tested by the thousands of generations before us.

the untapped potential of thousands of gifted students go to waste

Learning to flee without thought in response to a certain pattern of colours and movement that signalled a predator was essential for survival. Our neural circuits have been designed by natural selection to solve the problems our ancestors faced. They are programmed for survival, not to seek out truth. As evolutionary psychologists are fond of pointing out, our modern skulls house a Stone Age mind.

The exceptions, of course, are those notable individuals, like Marc Zuckerberg and Steve Jobs, who appear to be able to put aside routine thinking and produce deceptively simple ideas that totally transform our thinking and our way of life. A website on which we can exchange news and photos with family and friends – it couldn’t be simpler and we think, ‘I could have thought of that.’ And it’s true, you could, if only you had the skills of a smart thinker.

The greatest breakthroughs in our thinking, the revolutionary concepts that have so transformed our lives, have come from those who are smart thinkers. In 1905 a little known engineer, second class, at the Swiss patent office in Bern published four papers, which totally transformed the way we see the world. Albert Einstein had been turned down by every academic institution he had applied to, so he had no access to laboratories and knew nothing new, no more than anybody else. All he did was think differently. Like all smart thinkers, he challenged established concepts, like absolute space and time, created new, revolutionary concepts, like relativity, and forged surprising connections between ideas, like mass and energy, producing insights that were to transform our thinking.

we are all trapped by ideas and unexamined intuitions

The question is why is it so difficult for us all to think this way? Unfortunately, modern education systems are designed to teach students what to think, not how to think. Universities have always seen their primary responsibility as research, so, rather than teachers, they tend to appoint researchers, who only have a secondary responsibility to teach. This amounts largely to passing on their authoritative knowledge to students, not to develop their ability to think. A student then has the complementary role of recycling this authoritative opinion; showing that they understand it and can reproduce it accurately.

So, while we are busy producing a generation of the most sophisticated recyclers of received opinion, the untapped potential of thousands of gifted students go to waste trapped, like the monkey’s clenched fist, in the routine rules and patterns of conventional thinking.

1 J. M. Keynes, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, 1936 (London: Snowball Publishing, 2012), Preface, p. viii.


Bryan Greetham was born in Faversham, Kent, in England. He was educated at the University of Kent, where he gained a BA Hons in History, and at the University of Sussex, where he completed his MA in Intellectual History. He was awarded his PhD at the University of Newcastle in Australia for his work in moral thinking.

Currently Bryan is an Honorary Fellow in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Durham. Much of his work has been in moral thinking, applied and professional ethics and in complex adaptive systems. His current research involves what we can learn about moral thinking from the perpetrators, victims, rescuers and bystanders during the Holocaust.

He is the author of How to Write Better Essays, How to Write your Undergraduate Dissertation, both on writing and thinking skills, Philosophy, an introduction to philosophy for undergraduates, Thinking Skills for Professionals and his latest book, Smart Thinking, all published by Palgrave, Macmillan.

Understanding risk

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Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

By Bryan Greetham

In this period of COVID-19 it is essential that we understand risk and to do so means we need a basic understanding of the statistics involved in assessing risk.

On 23 rd August, Professor Chris Whitty, the UK’s chief medical adviser, claimed that children are more likely to be harmed by not returning to school next month than if they catch coronavirus. Although commonsense would suggest he’s probably right, you would hope that government policy is based on more than just commonsense; that it is backed by an objective, scientific assessment of risk. The problem is that trained professionals of all kinds struggle to understand information and assess risk. Judges, doctors, lawyers and jurors struggle to understand the evidence of probabilities laid before them, leading to confusion, misleading diagnoses and unsafe convictions that later have to be overturned.

trained professionals of all kinds struggle to understand information and assess risk.

In 1999 Sally Clark was found guilty of murdering her two infant children and given two life sentences. It was not until two other women had been convicted on the same basis that in January 2003 questions were asked about the figure given for the likelihood of two cot deaths occurring in one family. At the original trial this had been calculated as one in 73 million, which was arrived at by squaring 1 in 8,500, the figure for the chance of one event occurring. But it was based on the assumption that the two events were independent of one another, when in fact several studies had shown that there is an increased frequency of cot deaths in families where one had already occurred. This should have been challenged by the defence, but it wasn’t. Nobody seemed to understand the implications of the original assessment of the risk.

In Germany each year around 100,000 women have part of their breasts surgically removed after a positive test, when in fact most positive mammograms are false.

Unfortunately, their training has left professionals ill-equipped to make these sorts of calculations. Doctors often know the error rates of a clinical test and the base rate of a disease, but not how to infer from this the chances that a patient with a positive test has the disease. Consequently, many patients undergo unnecessary procedures, including surgery. In Germany each year around 100,000 women have part of their breasts surgically removed after a positive test, when in fact most positive mammograms are false.

By way of illustration, consider the following example. A prominent figure in medical research and teaching in Germany with over three decades of experience was given this problem. The probability that a woman has breast cancer is 0.8 per cent. If a woman has breast cancer, the probability is 90 per cent that she will have a positive mammogram. If she does not have breast cancer the probability is 7 per cent that she will still have a positive mammogram. Imagine a woman who has a positive mammogram. What is the probability that she actually has breast cancer?

David Eddy, former consultant to the Clinton administration on healthcare, gave essentially the same problem to 100 American doctors: 95 of them estimated the probability to be about 75 per cent, nearly 10 times the actual figure.

He studied it for about ten minutes and then guessed that it was around 90 per cent, although he wasn’t sure. The problem was also presented to 48 doctors with an average of 14 years experience, ranging from recent graduates to heads of departments. The estimates ranged from 1 per cent to 90 per cent; a third thought it was 90 per cent certain; a third estimated the chances to be 50 to 80 per cent; and a third estimated it to be lower than 10 per cent – half of these estimated it at 1 per cent. The median estimate was 70 per cent. Only 2 gave the correct estimate of around 8 per cent, but for the wrong reasons. David Eddy, former consultant to the Clinton administration on healthcare, gave essentially the same problem to 100 American doctors: 95 of them estimated the probability to be about 75 per cent, nearly 10 times the actual figure.

When information is presented in this form as a frequency, there is much less confusion and, as a result, much less variation in responses.

As with many problems the key to solving these lies in their representation: represent the problem differently and the solution seems so obvious that you wonder why you hadn’t seen it in the first place. Prior to the invention of probability theory in the 17th century, information was collected and processed as frequencies. For example, a doctor observes 100 people, 10 of whom have a new disease. Of these, eight display a symptom, while four of the 90 without the disease also show the symptom. The doctor, therefore, has four numbers to work with, four frequencies:

  1. Disease and symptom – 8
  2. Disease and no symptom – 2
  3. No disease and symptom – 4
  4. No disease and no symptom – 86

If she then observes a new patient with the symptom, she can easily see that the chances that this person has the disease is

Similarly, in a murder trial an expert witness might tell the jury that the DNA found at the murder scene matched the suspect’s DNA and there was only a 0.00001 probability or 0.001 per cent chance of being anyone else’s. Although it is difficult to get a clear sense of the significance of this, it does sound pretty convincing. But now present it as a frequency and things become a lot clearer. It means that out of every 100,000 people, one will show a match. So how many people are there who could have committed the murder? If the city in which this occurred has a 10 million adult population, there are 100 inhabitants, whose DNA would match the sample on the victim.

When information is presented in this form as a frequency, there is much less confusion and, as a result, much less variation in responses. There is also more likelihood that the public will have greater confidence in government statements and advice, if, along with ministers and advisers, we understand the calculations on which it is based.

1 Gerd Gigerenzer, Reckoning with Risk (London: Penguin, 2002), p. 229.
2 Gigerenzer, p. 41.

Bryan Greetham was born in Faversham, Kent, in England. He was educated at the University of Kent, where he gained a BA Hons in History, and at the University of Sussex, where he completed his MA in Intellectual History. He was awarded his PhD at the University of Newcastle in Australia for his work in moral thinking.

Bryan is the author of How to Write Better Essays, How to Write your Undergraduate Dissertation, both on writing and thinking skills, Philosophy, an introduction to philosophy for undergraduates, Thinking Skills for Professionals and his latest book, Smart Thinking, all published by Palgrave, Macmillan.

Fascism and Conspiracy

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Modern conspiracy theory and the appeal of fascism and racism for the working class

By Bryan Greetham

In my first contribution to this discussion about fascism I examined the claim that fascism was a last ditch response to failing capitalism. Unlike that issue, there seems to be very little evidence to suggest that there is clear economic motivation to explain why the working class support fascism and embrace racist beliefs. So I have never had a convincing explanation for why my uncle, a lifelong member of the Labour Party and a prominent member of his local branch, should also be a lifelong racist.

the willingness of ordinary people to embrace the most extraordinary conspiracy theories to explain why it is that, despite all their efforts and sacrifices, they have to suffer the most extreme economic and social inequality

And I don’t mean he was just anti-semitic, for which there was some reason, although implausible, in that he and his elder brother, my father, would have to trudge way across Gateshead every week to pay the weekly rent to a wealthy Jewish family that owned their home. I say this is not a plausible reason, because no form of racism has a plausible reason and, on a personal note, my father never had a racist thought in his head.

Up until a couple of years ago, I would have said that not only is there no plausible economic motivation for the working class to embrace fascism and racist beliefs, but there is no compelling psychological evidence either.

But the willingness of ordinary people to embrace the most extraordinary conspiracy theories to explain why it is that, despite all their efforts and sacrifices, they have to suffer the most extreme economic and social inequality, which over the last 40 years has come to match levels last recorded at the end of the Victorian era, may be good reason to think again.

So popular was The Protocols of the Elders of Zion that it was once second only to the Bible in its circulation.

Their willingness to believe the conspiracy theory that the EU is just a front disguising the real intentions of the Germans to dominate and reassert their hegemony of Europe rivals The Protocols of the Elders of Zion in attracting the support of working class people, who voted to leave the EU in large numbers as their forefathers flocked to support Mosley and the British Union of Fascists. So popular was The Protocols of the Elders of Zion that it was once second only to the Bible in its circulation.

the political problem comes first and the conspiracy theory is created to promote and protect the interests of a particular class or group by attracting the support of the working class, who might have little economic reason to embrace it.

Of course, this is not the only conspiracy that has been embraced with such fervour. Many also believe that Covid 19 is a pandemic conspiracy deliberately promoted by China, along with G5, climate change and no doubt many more. Like all forms of nationalism, the political problem comes first and the conspiracy theory is created to promote and protect the interests of a particular class or group by attracting the support of the working class, who might have little economic reason to embrace it.

Kenneth Minogue describes the claims of nationalists as mere ‘rhetoric‘: ‘a form of self-expression by which a certain kind of political excitement can be communicated from an elite to the masses. These ideas are chameleons that take on the colour of the locality around them.’ Ernest Gellner argues similarly that:

Nationalism is not the awakening of nations to self-consciousness: it invents nations where they do not exist.

They could both have been talking about the modern conspiracy theory and the appeal of fascism and racism for the working class. They have been invented to generate a certain type of political excitement and mobilise working class support.

Bryan Greetham was born in Faversham, Kent, in England. He was educated at the University of Kent, where he gained a BA Hons in History, and at the University of Sussex, where he completed his MA in Intellectual History. He was awarded his PhD at the University of Newcastle in Australia for his work in moral thinking.

Bryan is the author of How to Write Better Essays, How to Write your Undergraduate Dissertation, both on writing and thinking skills, Philosophy, an introduction to philosophy for undergraduates, Thinking Skills for Professionals and his latest book, Smart Thinking, all published by Palgrave, Macmillan.

Currently Bryan is an Honorary Fellow in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Durham. Much of his work has been in moral thinking, applied and professional ethics and in complex adaptive systems. His current research involves what we can learn about moral thinking from the perpetrators, victims, rescuers and bystanders during the Holocaust.


Fascism offered a return to pre-industrial society

National Socialism offered the lower middle class a way of side-stepping the choice between liberalism or socialism. It offered a return to traditional German values.

The Philospher Hiedegger, a supporter of fascism, in nature dressed in authentic German peasant costume

By Bryan Greetham

I wanted to take up the claim that fascism was a last ditch response to a failing capitalism, an attempt to rescue it.

One powerful incentive to embrace a radical right party, like the National Socialists, was self-interest. The radical right appealed to all those social groups (teachers, civil servants, army officers, small businessmen, shopkeepers, artisans, agricultural workers, etc.,) whose economic status and privileges were threatened by the two historical forces unleashed by the industrial revolution.

At the end of the First World War, the heirs of the modern world appeared to be liberalism and socialism. One or the other would dominate modern politics, thereby threatening the social and economic position of these lower middle class groups. In such a society, as one writer put it, these groups felt psychologically homeless: they were strangers in their own country. Their traditional values seemed to be under threat.

At the end of the First World War, the heirs of the modern world appeared to be liberalism and socialism. One or the other would dominate modern politics

On the one hand there were the free market principles of liberalism that were promoting the development of ever larger international companies that were taking the markets of small businessmen, shopkeepers, farmers, etc., by undercutting them. They stood for international values, rather than traditional Germanic values represented in the countryside by traditional artisans, farmers and agricultural labourers. This was a conflict between the urbane cosmopolitan values of the liberal classes in cities with their international connections and interests and the traditional values of the countryside.

Fascism appealed to traditional German values

On the other hand the industrial revolution had also brought to the surface the immense power of an organised working class with trade unions forcing up wages at the cost of small businessmen, and socialist governments increasing taxation on the lower middle class to fund the new social welfare programmes.

Professional groups, like civil servants and teachers who both were prominent among the membership lists of the National Socialists, saw their privileged middle class status under threat. They were faced with a bleak choice: either become members of one of the large trade unions and safeguard their income differentials with other groups of workers, or keep their middle class status by refusing to join a union and see the income gap between themselves and blue collar workers narrow and disappear.

At the same time that National Socialist politicians were talking about Jewish Bolshevik plotters they were also confusingly referring to International Jewish capitalism.

The problem they faced, of course, was that economic problems, like mass unemployment and inflation, could only be solved by resorting to concrete economic and social policies and these were inevitably liberal or socialist. To choose one of these policies was to give power and influence to the very influences that were changing German society in ways that were undermining their privileges.

National Socialism offered them a way of side-stepping this invidious choice – the Third Way: an alternative that promised to reverse these historical forces of liberalism and socialism and return to a pre-industrial society. Its answer was to sidestep the economic problems by arguing that they were not economic at all, but racial. By associating liberalism and socialism with Jews and a Jewish conspiracy they were able to activate latent anti-Semitism and nationalism and save these conservative groups from the threats they were facing.

At the same time that National Socialist politicians were talking about Jewish Bolshevik plotters they were also confusingly referring to International Jewish capitalism. Cities and their urbane culture were associated with Jews, who were said to have no roots in German culture. Here was soulless capitalism compared to the countryside, where traditional Germanic values were still respected. 

We Were Caught in the Neo-liberal Trap

But now we have another pivotal moment.

Photo by ardeshir etemad on Pexels.com

By Bryan Greetham

Before the Second World War a German chemist was working to discover what we would call today an antibiotic. Each evening he would leave out Petri dishes with bacteria in them so they could grow during the night for him to work on the next day. But everyday he found them dead covered in mould spores, which he assumed came from the spores in the corners of the laboratory. Consequently, he had everything thoroughly cleaned and decontaminated.

Unfortunately, he was unsuccessful in his search for an antibiotic. Yet, if he had only reversed his intuitive assumptions and seen the spores as a solution, rather than a problem, he might have realised that they were the very thing he was looking for. Eventually the Nobel Prize for the discovery of penicillin went to Sir Alexander Fleming after he discovered it in similar mould that had destroyed his own cultures of bacteria.

We are now caught in the same cognitive trap: our expectations are so constrained within the confines of the ruling ideas that we fall victim to unforeseen, deeply destructive events, which, with the benefit of hindsight, were obvious. This is what Nasim Taleb describes as a ‘black swan’: an ‘unknown unknown’.

We reassure ourselves that despite their destructiveness and transformative impact on our lives, they only come rarely. But now we are in the midst of our second in barely twelve years. On the eve of the financial crash of 2007/8 political leaders had no idea what was about to come. Gordon Brown declared that, as a result of the ingenuity and creativity of bankers, ‘A new world order has been created.’ He announced, reassuringly, that we have the privilege of living in ‘an era that history will record as the beginning of a new Golden Age’.

Equally confident, even when there were clear signs that the banking system was in trouble, David Cameron confidently declared that, largely as a result of the bankers’ efforts, a new world economy had been created. The Left’s misguided belief in regulation had been thoroughly discredited, he claimed, ‘Liberalism’ had prevailed and the world economy was now more stable than for a generation. And, as if to underline just how much leaders failed to understand, recently the Bank of England released the minutes of its meetings before the crash, which reveal that they had no idea what was about to happen.

Now we have another black swan. With the signs of the pandemic beginning to appear, in mid January 2020 the World Economic Forum that organises the Davos meetings of the global business elite released its annual global risks report. This is the collective wisdom of hundreds of experts about possible threats. The possibility of a global pandemic did not register, even though by late January cases of Covid 19 had already been reported in Europe.

To divert attention from the failings of his own administration, Donald Trump said that the coronavirus ‘came out of nowhere’, it ‘blindsided the world’, despite the predictions of those not caught in the same cognitive trap. After the Ebola outbreak in 2014 Bill Gates warned that it was now time to prepare for a new pandemic with scenario planning, vaccine research and health worker training. Instead, the Trump administration dismantled the National Security Council directorate at the White House charged with preparing for another pandemic.

But black swans are also pivotal moments, opportunities to address the urgent need for social and political change. Few would have thought such fundamental change was possible a year, even six months, ago. But now governments that pride themselves on their libertarian principles are curtailing freedoms in ways more typical of wartime. There are conservative governments that have for the last ten years been ruthlessly pursuing policies of austerity now sanctioning the spending of unprecedented billions on healthcare and emergency measures, the very services most affected by their austerity.

Like the German chemist, in 2007/8 we had a choice: we could either continue with our conventional beliefs and bail out the wealthy bankers with taxpayers’ money and then recoup it from taxpayers’ pockets with lower real wages and reduced services, or we could change our assumptions and create a more equitable and efficient system. Now we have another pivotal moment. In just about all countries the focus has shifted from individual consumption to collective wellbeing. We have the opportunity to end unlimited resource consumption and design a new economic system that addresses the levels of inequality not seen since the nineteenth century.

Bryan Greetham was born in Faversham, Kent, in England. He was educated at the University of Kent, where he gained a BA Hons in History, and at the University of Sussex, where he completed his MA in Intellectual History. He was awarded his PhD at the University of Newcastle in Australia for his work in moral thinking.

Bryan is the author of How to Write Better Essays, How to Write your Undergraduate Dissertation, both on writing and thinking skills, Philosophy, an introduction to philosophy for undergraduates, Thinking Skills for Professionals and his latest book, Smart Thinking, all published by Palgrave, Macmillan.

Currently Bryan is an Honorary Fellow in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Durham. Much of his work has been in moral thinking, applied and professional ethics and in complex adaptive systems. His current research involves what we can learn about moral thinking from the perpetrators, victims, rescuers and bystanders during the Holocaust.

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