Public ideas
A portrait of Karl Popper
A white swan event
We probably know Karl Popper from his 1945 book The open society and its enemies, and the idea that a theory based on observation can never be proven, but that there is always the possibility that it can be falsified by evidence. By extension a theory that is incapable of falsification is junk. (“Earth is regularly visited by aliens, who leave no trace of their visits.”)
The ABC Science Show of June 28 is devoted to A portrait of Karl Popper, taking us into other aspects of his life and his contribution to public ideas. In particular he explains how we develop beliefs. Our beliefs do not necessarily arise from experience. Rather, we form theories, and allow experiences that confirm those theories to shape our beliefs. The confirmation bias is not just an error in thinking: it’s a lifetime habit.
Is Trump an aberration?
Some observers see the rise of Trump, and the displacement of democracy by populist authoritarianism as inevitable movements, as a response to the failure of democracy to deliver what people seek and need.
A reader has put us on to an ABC Big Ideas session Will American democracy survive the Dark Enlightenment. Sarah Churchwell, Professor of American Literature and Chair of Public Understanding of the Humanities at the University of London, explains the Trump phenomenon in the context of American history. She adds her voice to the many people who point out that Trump is not an aberration. If anything it was the New Deal that was the exception: it did not die with Roosevelt, but it lingered on at least until the Reagan Administration. It is easy, but mistaken, to consider political liberalism as a “normal” aspect of American culture. American fascism has been there all along, but for much of the twentieth century is was pushed underground.
For a time in recent history liberals were able to define the “American dream” in terms of Enlightenment values, but Trump and those around him are redefining that dream, in line with “white”, male, anti-intellectual values.
Churchwell’s most recent book is her 2022 work The wrath to come: Gone with the wind and the lies America tells. Margaret Mitchell’s 1936 novel Gone with the wind romanticizes the pre-Civil War south, glossing over the brutality of slavery. Churchwell suggests Trump is tapping into a similar yearning for an imagined antebellum American “white” man’s paradise.