You know our favourite CentreRight parlour game: someone asks "What is Conservatism?" and then we enjoy piling in to the ensuing debate (it's about freedom! it's about control! it's about individual liberty! it's about a strong society!). Today I'd like to offer an epistemic basis for a particular definition held by people like myself. In other words, how is it that I believe my theory is a good one? Not the only one, not even demonstrably the best one (though I think that it is): but I want to explore the grounds on which anyone could advance any theory about what a Conservative should be.
I'm going to offer a rationale - some a priori reasoning, made in the absence of data, about why my view of Toryism has validity. But I wouldn't be a scientist if I didn't offer to test that theory against some data, to see what empirical support there is for the views that I hold. Finally, building on these first two stages, I'm going to suggest some general principles for reasoning about how Conservatives should approach the business of both constructing and checking on policy and its outcomes.
First I'd better say as explicitly as possible what I think the core of Conservatism to be. It is good neighbourliness. You might remember the articles I've posted here about my 'swimming pool theory': that the best swimming pools are those where you look after the interests of the swimmers closest to you; and that from such neighbourly behaviour is induced globally optimum behaviour across the entire pool, quite without the need for external rules, standard operating procedures or lifeguard bellowing. It doesn't take much to extend the analogy from a swimming pool to life in general: if you care about your neighbour, your whole street will be happier. If we let our streets be happier, the city will work better. And so on. I think this is the basis for the localism set out brilliantly, for example, in Dan Hannan and Douglas Carswell's The Plan. The point is that good outcomes come from looking after people next to us, not from inorganic machine-rules imposed from above.
(I'm not saying that leftwingers cannot be good neighbours by the way - of course not. But their actions in government suggest that they cling to a belief that Good Outcomes For You are best originated at the centre, then transmitted down the spokes of society's wheel through a sequence of instructions on how to behave, until those signals arrive - distorted, at best - at the hubs to which Hackney dwellers like myself cling).
In fact I have elevated this trust in localism to one of my basic, core values. I do believe that all we can change is all we can love, and we love best that which we can reach out and touch. I don't want to be accused of being locally selfish, however, so we'd better see if there is any theoretical and empirical basis for this belief.
Theoretical support
By total historical accident, my postgraduate research involved the investigation of mathematical structures known as Markov Random Fields. They're quite amazing (and practically useful) objects but it's one aspect of them that interests me in terms of relevance as a basis for localism.
Imagine a two-dimensional plane of points, arranged in regular (or irregular) fashion, like a net, thrown across a space. Imagine that each point on that graph can be coloured either black or white. Each point is joined to four other points, to its north, south, east and west. (I'll ignore what happens at the edges but if you want to theoretically criticise what follows, this is where to start).
Someone gives you an estimate of the true colouring of each point ('node', in geekspeak) and says to you: based on this noisy and blurred representation, give me the most probable true colouring for all of the nodes. In other words, provide me an estimate of global (across the entire graph) truth.
Here's the amazing thing. It turns out that if you focus in on small, defined neighbourhoods of points on the graph, by thinking of each point and only its neighbours in turn; and if you insist on some form of local 'niceness' (not the word commonly used in the literature) in those neighbourhoods, then you will induce a globally optimum level of niceness across the entire net. (Under certain conditions, of course. The seminal paper by Julian Besag is here). Even doing my statistics research on something very practical (how to use this method to get good representations of brain scan data), I was struck by what a very powerful and translatable notion this was.
Now think of each dot on my theoretical graph as a swimmer in a real pool. Can you see - there's at least some mathematical logic underpinning the natural human desire to look after our neighbours. It doesn't mean that we don't care about the people far distant. It does mean that you can most likely help them by looking after the men and women next to you.
Empirical support
I think there are signs popping up in the literature that point to the existence of a psychological substrate for this sort of behaviour. In this week's New Scientist, Michael Bond describes an experiment which suggests there "is evidence that altruistic acts spread through social networks. In other words, if you are kind to a friend, they are more likely to be kind to someone else they know". In one sense this is trite (as the article admits) but on the other hand it is real evidence which backs up the instinct, which most Tories share, that local action will deliver globally good results. In another recent psychological study, the investigators found that people become more generous towards strangers if they first feel a sense of obligation towards them: if they've been in a quandary, together, and found a common solution, then they are subsequently more willing to give money to good causes. This, surely, has something to tell us about the balance between local and national tax-raising, and about where decisions about local expenditure should be made.
(I was led to both these articles by Stephan Shakespeare (@StephanShaxper) and Roger Highfield (@RogerHighfield) on Twitter, for which many thanks).
Now both these experiments have produced outcomes which you might have expected ahead of time. But suppose they had not; suppose that no matter how often you were kind to a friend, they remained implacably hateful towards the rest of humanity. If such a finding was typical, it would force me to revisit my 'good neighbour' hypothesis. The evidence we do have, however, increases my support for the theory.
Towards an empirical Conservatism
The extent to which I've convinced you about the virtues of neighbourly localism will be a mixture of how much you instinctively agree with my 'swimming pool' theory of the good life, and how much weight you attach to the evidence contained in those two articles (and other evidence from your own life). In other words, the evidence will, to a degree, have modulated your belief (or otherwise) in the initial theory.
This is nothing more than the application of Bayesian reasoning to politics. (It is how I 'do science' at work - that's Thomas Bayes at the top of the piece). And I think it suggests a paradigm for Conservative policy-making. We all have a variety of instinctive Tory beliefs - our opponents would call them 'prejudices' - but we do sometimes struggle to give them a sound philosophical underpinning that isn't in some sense circular. Our lack of adherence to a rigid ideology is, of course, one of our political strengths (and it is our opponents' consequent weakness).
This form of reasoning is a rational synthesis of a priori opinion with factual evidence. It shows how to modulate belief in a theory on the basis of evidence. It cautions against being either an ideologue (where belief is everything), or an adherent of the depressingly void 'whatever works' school of pragmatism (which Matthew Parris has rightly pointed out is a short cut to value-free politics).
We don't need a thought-experiment to wonder what happens in the absence of this type of reasoning. Almost every failure of this government can be linked to either value-free 'whatever works' 'thinking' (perhaps its foreign policy? certainly the Mandelsonian oligarch-esque approach to industrial policy) or, more often, to a blinkered adherence to an authoritarian, centrist ideology (ID cards, tax credits, the filthy Independent Safeguards Authority). Regardless of the evidence produced to show that there are problems with these policies, a succession of ministers continues to parrot the line that the policy must be preserved because it is, in and of itself, A Good Thing. They believe in their policies with probability one - with complete certainty - and no amount of evidence will shake their belief. That's probably the most frightening thing about Gordon Brown. It's the opposite of the approach we should take in Government.