Somewhere around 1979 or 80, I read Paul Feyerabend’s Against Method. I got to it by a roundabout route: his How To Be a Good Empiricist was in a Philosophy of Science tutorial reading list, and I was sufficiently intrigued by that to read more of him.
Against Method is not without its critics, some, though by no means all, of whom understood what Feyerabend was getting at. It’s a while since I last read it and the detail fades, but I do recall the thrust of one of his core suggestions: that Galileo succeeded in the long run not because he had better arguments in the abstract, but because he was better at arguing.
A similar analysis can be made of Martin Luther, often said to have sparked revolution when he nailed his theses to a church door. That’s not really true: his theses were in latin and unintelligible to most of the population. He really got motoring when he pointed out, during a period of significant local economic trouble due to widespread crop failure, that German money was lining Italian pockets.
This has been in my mind for a lot of this year in the context of Brexit and the US election. It will also be important if we ever have to endure another Indy referendum here in Scotland. There was an assumption on the part of the ‘Remain’ side and the non-fascist part of America (and remains an assumption of the “No” side in Scotland), that it is enough to present facts and arguments to convince the ‘other side’ of the logic of your case, at which point they will shake your hand and thank you for correcting their misconceptions.
They will not.
Analysis and logic are important, but they are not sufficient; in fact they are easily sidestepped by portraying them as the nit-picking pettifoggery of “experts”. The SNP understand this, as does the loathsome Farage. For those of us who value an open, inclusive society, we need positions and arguments that appeal to people’s emotion and instinct, not just their minds.
And they need to be memorably expressed in no more than 140 characters.
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