Life-Changing Books - Part One

Popper's thoughts on the open society

"Wall of Books" by benuski is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0

Although most books have the potential to change someone’s life, most of the time this doesn’t happen. Those of us who read a lot of non-fiction will recognize the feeling of finishing a good book and immediately reaching for the next one. Once in a while, though, a book will hit you right between the eyes and set your life on a new course. In today’s post and next week’s one, I will talk about two times that this has happened to me.

I grew up in a left-wing family in a left-wing city (Norwich in the UK). When I was a teenager, I was very concerned about nuclear war and got involved in the movement for unilateral disarmament. This brought me into contact with a lot of other social movements. Some, like the anti-apartheid movement, were truly noble causes. Others, like the early environmentalist movement, had spotted a real problem but were let down by poor predictions of imminent doom. The hard left, who wanted to completely redesign society from top to bottom, were always visible in these circles.

By the time I went to university, it seemed completely obvious to me that well-meaning people should tear everything down and rebuild in a more rational way. Admittedly, I wasn’t very clear on the details! I decided to get involved in far-left student politics, but being an argumentative type never signed on the dotted line with any of the revolutionary cults. At the same time, my philosophy lecturers were doing their best to make me think hard about the skeptical tradition. I didn’t realize it at the time, but the contrast between cocksure student revolutionaries and some of the most subtle thinkers in world history triggered intense cognitive dissonance.

The matter came to a head in November 1989, at the beginning of my second year. The Berlin Wall fell. It was obvious which way the crowds were running. I realized that a lot of my core beliefs might need to be adjusted. Luckily, the philosophy department of a university is the perfect place to engage in double-loop learning. I went to the library with a mission to find out what I had been getting wrong and to develop some new core beliefs. I was in the perfect frame of mind to read Karl Popper’s The Open Society and Its Enemies for the first time.

Popper was born into an family with Jewish roots in Austria in 1902. After a brief flirtation with the hard left in his youth, he became a liberal and achieved a PhD in psychology. Worried by the prospect of Austria joining forces with Nazi Germany, he emigrated to New Zealand in 1937. He wrote his masterwork on politics there during World War II and published it in 1945. He moved to the UK after the War, where he had a long and distinguished career as a philosopher.

The core idea of Popper’s book on open societies is that for most of human history, our ancestors have lived in closed, tribal societies. The customs of the society stand above criticism. Dissidents can be expelled or killed. Popper believed that there was a turning point in Ancient Greece, as some societies began to become open and cosmopolitan. He saw the great skeptical philosopher Socrates, who believed in questioning everything, as a key thinker marking the transition between the two types of society.

After the Athenians voted for Socrates’ death for the crime of being irritating, his follower Plato wrote dialogues featuring him as the lead character. Popper thought that Plato’s early dialogues represented Socrates’ true beliefs, while his alleged belief in social engineering in The Republic represents a betrayal of his skepticism.

Popper argues that allowing members of society to freely question everything will lead to pluralism. In a plural society, we might never be able to reach a consensus on key issues. He says this doesn’t matter very much. All we can ask is for everyone to live under the same laws. He says that some people will always feel uncomfortable in free and open societies and will yearn for the certainties of a tribal society, where certain issues, symbols and people are closed off from criticism. He says that one way of spotting the enemies of the open society are that they will try and convince you that their vision of a perfect society is somehow inevitable. He identified Marxism and fascism as two contemporary examples of people wanting to return to a closed society.

As I mentioned earlier, I read The Open Society at exactly the right time, as a young philosophy student wondering whether Marxism might be a flawed ideology. The book opened my eyes to the limitations of student revolutionaries. I quickly moved from the fringes of the hard left to the soft left. Popper planted a seed that would grow slowly over the years. Much later, I came to realize I was a liberal rather than a socialist. I think the key insight I took from the book was a distrust of people who want to completely redesign society without worrying too much about what the little people think.

If you have never studied philosophy, The Open Society is a difficult read. Popper spends a large amount of time discussing Plato’s alleged betrayal of Socrates. This is gripping if you happen to be in the middle of a philosophy degree. If not, it can seem a strange place to start, which makes it hard to get to grips with the book’s structure.

Nowadays, I would recommend Amartya Sen’s Identity and Violence as a better starting point. It covers similar ground to Popper from a different angle, but is much more accessible. If you want to dig deeper into the similarities between communism and fascism, Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism is a brutal read. The importance of conspiracy theories to both Nazism (the most toxic form of fascism) and Stalinism (the most toxic form of communism) is a constant theme throughout the book.

Recent research has backed up some of Popper’s views on the closed society. I particularly recommend Richard Wrangham’s The Goodness Paradox. Jonathan Haidt’s work shows why angry intolerance comes so easily to us. The Righteous Mind is well worth reading. Finally, the contrast between open and closed societies is captured beautifully in a terrifying science-fiction book about time travel: Octavia Butler’s Kindred. See you next week!

Part Two is available here (24/7/21)

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[Updated on 10 March 2022] Opinions expressed on Substack and Twitter are those of Rupert Cocke as an individual and do not reflect the opinions or views of the organization where he works or its subsidiaries.