It is a paradox of Hayek's reputation that he is seen as a philosopher of the right, of individualism, when his societal epistemology is grounded in population thinking, though not in collectivism. It is this latter point that explains the reputation. A societal epistemology grounded in population thought has no single collective locus or mental representation. It is distributed in fragments throughout the population of individuals, and ebbs and flows dynamically, changing as it flows. Since there is no single representation it cannot (and need not) be captured and represented by a Vanguard Class. – Indeed, it cannot be transplanted from the population becaue, firstly, the informational scale is too great, partly because it is a process and not a result, and most importantly because the population simultaneously knows and acts. It does not require an executive to deliver its will; it knows and as it knows it acts. This is the essence of liberal society, in which free individuals exercise their preferences locally, creating as an emergent property a combined societal act of knowing and doing.

The influence of Terry Deary's Horrible Histories has as at least as many downsides as upsides. Yes, it interests young readers in the past, but the kind of interest they take is of a patronising, self-centered and unsympathetic kind that trivialises their understanding and as a matter of fact lingers on in the mind of the subsequent adult.

Of course, Deary is not responsible for the tendency to look down on the past, to rubber-neck at its gruesome details, all of which is a spontaneous fact of the human mind, but his skilfull monetization of that inclination has certainly reinforced its occurrence, and it now breaks surface everywhere, even in the comments of professional scholars, who have hitherto and for the most part seen their role as attempting to overcome the instinctive sneer, the voyeuristic leer of the complacent Modern.

For example, an article in today's Times, by no means a bad or silly piece, describes a skeleton, known as Context 958, discovered in a 13th Century hospital graveyard in Cambridge as presenting a "mystery". The academic archaeologist analysing the bones, Professor John Robb, explains: “What was really jarring was that although he was clearly a low-status person, his dietary isotopes showed him to have had quite an enriched diet. He was either eating above his station or he was buried below his station.” Professor Robb goes on to speculate that he did well out of the "wealthy scholars of the university" for whom he worked.

The article translates all this very accurately into the adult dialect of Dearyese:

His body bears marks of manual toil, but the chemistry of his bones tells a very different story; there are the traces of a diet rich in meat and fish, which would not have been easy for the average commoner to come by. [...] On the face of it, however, Context 958’s existence was largely one of hardship. His tooth enamel stopped growing twice when he was young, hinting at bouts of sickness or famine, and he seems to have taken a fair battering, with the back of his skull revealing a blunt-force trauma that healed over before he died. He also suffered from several unpleasant dental diseases and may have had the beginnings of gout. “He had clearly been around the block,” Professor Robb said.

The implied drama here is obvious. Context 958, and even the name has a Film Noire morgue ring to it, was a medieval rogue, a knowing "character" with a chequered and mysterious, even weird and eccentric history, bad teeth and head injuries, who somehow managed to snaffle a nice scrap or two thanks to his lucky relationship with the undeserving priveliged.

But there is only a puzzle requiring this sort of imaginative solution if the assumptions of the Fairy Tales and the Horrible Histories are right. But are they? Perhaps the diet of the poor was not unremittingly and stomach-churningly ghastly. Perhaps medieval society was not quite the rigid cartoon of "station" and rank that it is often assumed to be. Perhaps even those on lower incomes could eat well at some periods in their lives, perhaps there was a certain amount of social mobility and perhaps an individual's luck went up and down. Unless you had been raised on Horrible Histories and spent a lifetime teaching undergraduates with minds formed by such attitudes (teachers should get danger money), would it be that surprising to learn that the past was not completely unlike the present?

In the last few days I have got back in touch with an academic acquaintance with whom I hadn't corresponded for perhaps twenty years. Glancing back over hard disk copies of those letters I found one, from November 1992, that was in substance a short essay on the state of research in the humanities. Though strident, it seems to me have made points that were sound, and perhaps still are in the abstract. It can be downloaded here.

No one throws coins into a fountain from which they may be easily retrieved. There must be room for the presumption of absolute loss, to mankind as well as yourself, as if they were sacrificial dolls thrown into a smoking South American volcano. But the descending arc of that puppet, the sound of a coin rattling down a deep well is a transient thrill, while in the broad but shallow fountain the sacrifice remains visible, and this is utterly compelling for those who wish to relish their sacrifice and, perhaps this is crucial, advertise it to others. Five minutes is enough.

Many writers are showing signs of unease with the current condition of science. Three examples: Matt Ridley recently gave a lecture in which he declared himself "In love with science as a philosophy" but "increasingly disaffected from science as an institution"; the American writer John Tierney has just published an article detecting disabling politicisation in much of the natural and social sciences; the economist Paul Romer has made explosive statements suggesting that macro-economics, particularly its mathetical branches has become self-serving belief-system corrupted by respect for authority and detached from reality.

Is there some general problem that has made the sciences so prone to the institutional, and political corruption which Ridley and Tierney identify, and indeed to other corrupting influences such as those described in Romer’s article?

The answer is yes, and the general problem is to be found in the hypostasisation of science itself. The roots of this mistake lie in fragile human self-regard, and in career structures. Confronted with the distressingly provisional nature of their propositions, researchers have, understandably, taken comfort (and incomes) from the view that while pebbles are as nothing, the cairn is forever.

In other words that there is something called Science, a body of sure knowledge that persists beyond the deletion and replacement of any individual part. This view borders on the mystical, and is a long way from the much humbler suggestion that ‘science' is not knowledge in itself, but is little more than a loosely defined and extremely successful though interminable method for creating and testing propositions. Nor are these provisional propositions knowledge in themselves; rather they are just the means by which a mind can represent and analyse the causal process that is observed. Mathematics is no exception: it is, as Bridgman noted, in The Nature of Thermodynamics (1969), and for all its astounding merits, just another language, and its propositions in essence no different from any other propositions. There are no foundations for anything, anything at all.

Furthermore, at any one time the population of those propositions, in whatever language, has no organic, or integrated character. Indeed, all our propositions are in some degree inconsistent or incompletely consistent with each other, however useful in particular domains. Because of that inconsistency, no mind, even if omnipotent, could represent them all simultaneously and be the realisation of Science in the hypostasised sense.– The existence of lacunae and inconsistencies demonstrates that there is presently no such thing as Science, and never could be since that would require an infinite number of propositions, and the universe isn't big enough to instantiate such a self-description. There is not such thing as Science, there are just scientists and the things scientists say, and that loosely defined, sceptical method, which is in many respects rather more important than either.

Put more simply, we have steadily been losing sight of the fundamental paradox of the history and philosophy of science; namely, that humans only started to make rapid progress in the mental representation of the world when some individuals recognised, in their work if not explicitly, that there was no absolute truth to be had anywhere, at any time, by any means. Liberated from the distracting pursuit and disheartening oversight of a non-existent ideal, attention could be focused on refinements to the propositions that we can in fact generate. The results are excellent, and the careless reintroduction of an epistemological absolute would be a terrible mistake. God was a nuisance; reborn as Science he will be a positive curse.

Wonder is an over-rated state of mind. Popular scientific writers, Dawkins springs to mind but he is one of very many, use this to generate the sense that their observations are far from demeaning, and instead result in an elevated respect for the observed world, and ourselves our place in that world. It is in essence self-congratulation.

Much more significantly, it is an attempt to offset the sense of diminished potential that inevitably arises from comprehension. It is not immediately obvious, I suppose, why comprehension should cause this depressing effect; after all, understanding leads to power. The reason is this: comprehension makes definite those possibilities that were before unknown and could without any further justification plausibly be held to be very broad, indeed infinite since there is no evidence to the contrary. - Of the unknown, anything can be believed or hoped for.

Once clarified a potential is always (always!) made definite, and its limits made clear. It becomes manifestly finite rather than plausibly infinite. Even the sense that the universe is astonishingly big is accompanied by a sense of limitation that is absent from the more wonderful suggestion that earth is surrounded by a small solar system and the stars, because around that, in a very nebulous sense, lies the infinity of God, which is uplifting since it promises unbounded potential.

Understanding, science, delivers the contrary evidence to the temporarily plausible belief that a potential is infinite, and this is not so much unwelcome as simply less interesting. All minds, without exception, are drawn to pursue greater potentials, the next mystery; the known may be useful, but it is not as exciting. The rewards that are delivered by understanding, the sense of concretization, the sense of reality, to put it bluntly, these are not as attractive to any mind, however educated. This is entirely adaptive; once known, a subject properly loses much of its excitement; our interests lie in swiftly moving on to the next unknown, additional and possibly greater resource. It is this that lies behind the richly confirmed commonplace that the pursuit of any goal is more engaging to the mind than attainment. Indeed, in intellectual matters it is only by careful discipline that a mind can be trained to steer back towards still greater understanding of a matter already understood.

Wonder, then, is the last thing to be delivered by science, and its use in the marketing of popular scientific writings is suasive rhetoric. But this is not a trivial and forgivable matter; on the contrary it is a deeply misleading misrepresentation of the principal characteristic of understanding. Richard Dawkins and his colleagues did not set out with this result in mind, but it is what popular writings on this subject have actually achieved.

It is surprising that theological and religious writing in general does not does not spend more time in description of the virtues and rewards of the afterlife. After all, these are the ultimate benefits offered to believers, the benefits that are proposed as compensations for all other sufferings and pleasures foregone.

But even when these are envisaged in concrete terms (a set number of virgins) and particularly when they are presented in quasi-concrete terms (abstract bliss) they seem both dull and unconvincing, which is an unusual combination since the dreary is more often than not rather plausible.

The explanation for the infrequency of the attempt and the weak results that obtain when it is attempted seems to be that in reasoning from earthly life to make a picture of life in the land of the blessed the thinker must attempt two impossible tasks. Firstly, he must take satisfaction or contentment, which on earth is only the necessarily temporary absence of need, and present it as a permanent, in other words a timeless condition. This is incoherent; satisfaction and contentment imply a preceding state that is unsatisfactory and with which we are not content. In other words, time is implicit in these concepts and cannot be abolished without absurdity.

Secondly, those outlining the peace of heaven must describe as a conscious experience an absence of disturbing or irritating stimuli, an absence that we only know by contrasting the temporary condition of unconscious sleep, of which we are unaware, with our manifestly apparent waking selves. Of course, this is impossible; one cannot be both asleep and awake. Similarly, we cannot conceive of a conscious experience that is absolutely peaceful, and the only approximation that we can make to this imaginary state is boredom. No wonder, then, that the devil is said to have the best tunes.

We vomit if exposed to the smell of putrid flesh. Why? Because our ancestors were omnivorous and scavenging animals that often took advantage of carrion. Many animals, particularly large ones, rot from the inside out, so our forebears might easily eat some parts of an animal before releasing the gases produced by advanced internal decomposition. The presence of these gases would be a good indicator that the flesh eaten was itself contaminated, so our ancestors would be have been selected, if they had regurgitated it, thus reducing the probability of poisoning.

29 March 1992, Teatro Romano, Fiesole

Eliot's remark on population – "I cannot conceive of the term 'overpopulation' coming to mean anything while there is still room to stand" – suggests that he never sat in such a place as this, looked out over the hills and thought of them as densely peopled. Even as it is there are probably too few for full cultivation without machines.

Why are the rich such diligent and unquestioning believers in utopian fantasies of all kinds, why are they enthusiastic advocates for and purchasers of snake-oil in politics, engineering, and science?

If there is a foolish, half-baked proposal to “change the world” why does it find so many supporters amongst the rich, and proportionately so few amongst the middle classes and the poor?

Because the rich believe the world to be infinitely plastic, and they believe this since it is a rational inference from their daily experience; the world bends to their will, food drops into their mouths on demand, they move across the surface of the earth with little resistance, as if gravity and friction were all but completely absent. Nothing stands in their way, for long; they want for nothing, and fear nothing.

The rest of us, by contrast, are pessimistic; we see the world as inflexible, because that is our experience. We move in a viscous and obstructive environment in which, like small flies in air, which is treacle to them, we must struggle to make progress. But like those flies, we are also supported by the stable conditions that impede us. Hence the paradox that the poor are often also very conservative. What little advantage we have is threatened by change, for change is, in our experience, driven by others, frequently rich others, and for their own advantage not ours.