From Karl Popper to George Soros: The Open Society and Its Frenemies
By Tedd Siegel
“My father taught me many things here. He taught me in this room. He taught me, keep your friends close but your enemies closer.” –Michael Corleone, Godfather Part II
The Basis of American Greatness
This post is a defense of the ideal of The Open Society which is presently under serious attack by the “Make America Great Again” crowd, with their various authoritarian, white supremacist dog whistles. It mostly stems from my incredulity, as someone raised in Silicon Valley, at the notion that terrorizing immigrants and minorities, threatening the freedom of the press, and adopting anti-science as an official stance, among other things, will make America more globally competitive and generally stronger.
What is the Open Society? The famous philosopher of science Karl Popper, himself very much a ‘man in dark times’ wrote a major work entitled “The Open Society and Its Enemies” in the 1940s. Popper reasonably assumed that the threat to the ideal of the open society came from without, rather than within–from totalitarian political projects and the historicist and romanticist philosophers of history to which these ‘projects’ implicitly appealed when making legitimacy claims. In this work, Popper objected to such claims that relied on some version of the Hegelian ‘cunning of reason.’ This is the idea that truth or right, or the best of all possible worlds, was somehow ‘working itself out behind our backs’ in and through the great tumult of human irrational self-seeking passions and actions, according to what was an otherwise hidden grand design. The true advance of rationality, so this story went, played itself out in the progress of spirit across the parade of nations on the terrain of world history, rather than through the direct and self-conscious rationality of individually responsible actors determined to live within structures of a just society.
Popper’s ideas concerning the open society are laid out in two thick tomes, the three-part Open Society and Its Enemies, and his Conjectures and Refutations, written later in the early 60s. The first one, as mentioned, was a survey of the perennial contest between the two tendencies (closed/open) in both ancient and recent history, and the equivocal role played by philosophers and other intellectuals. In Conjectures and Refutations, Popper offers something of a restatement, attempting to show that his account of the rationality of science as a logic of discovery can be meaningfully applied as a general theory of the attitude of critical rationality bridging science and democratic politics.
The attributes of closed societies are easy to discern, because we view them through a telescopic lens, for example, when we peer into the “hermit kingdom” of North Korea.
When I think of the ideal of an open society today, I generally think about a collection of attributes that exist at the intersection of democratic self-governance, the spirit of economic liberalism, and the rationality and practice of science. Included are such things as the rule of law and procedural justice, the rights of man as enshrined in the bill of rights, the structures of civil society underlying and regulating commerce in a mixed economy. Basically, those things that together give concreteness to the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness in the broad sense.
For everyday purposes, the open society appears most clearly and easily by way of contrast to its opposite, the closed society. The attributes of closed societies are easy to discern, because we view them through a telescopic lens, for example, when we peer into the “hermit kingdom” of North Korea. Closed societies exercise high levels of state control over all aspects of private, civil, economic, and political life, regulating the lives of citizens through the mandatory observance of a state ideology, and via state controlled media. Closed societies limit the movement of citizens internally, have closed borders, and are distrustful of outsiders. Most if not all social and economic advancement depends on the patronage of ruling elites.
Open societies then, by contrast, tend toward the opposite poles with respect to location of these attributes on a gradient scale. In general, they are politically free, provide human rights guarantees, respect the rule of law, allow for free thinking individually and collectively, are diverse and cosmopolitan, and as such, welcoming to minorities and foreigners. It is generally understood that where societies are open as opposed to closed, they are so because they recognize that the rewards, in terms of such things as health, prosperity, economic competitiveness, innovation, and cultural vibrancy, far outweigh the risks (a real or perceived lack of public safety and order, shared cultural values, the ups and downs of economic laissez-faire). In short, by any rational measure, openness so understood is a big part of what has traditionally made America great.
The Open Society After Communism
Karl Popper’s reception has had cycles of heating and cooling in various ways since the middle of the past century. His contribution to the philosophy of science, where he pushed through a number of impasses that paved the way for the more contemporary debates of Thomas Kuhn and Paul Feyerabend, etc., is assured. Another work, The Poverty of Historicism, is still widely read by academicians. His social scientific contributions, however, found new life and energy in the early 90s, after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the toppling of the Berlin Wall. Since no Marshall Plan for eastern Europe was forthcoming (George Soros says he raised the idea and was literally laughed at) the question of the hour was how to transition rapidly from a closed, totalitarian society to an open, liberal democratic one.
Communism had encouraged a kind of widespread immorality, because people had to find whatever ways they could to survive in what Vaclav Havel called the communist “Absurdistan.”
In her paper, “Minima Moralia: Is There an Ethics to the Open Society?” author and activist Sandra Pralong, who among other things is an adviser to the Romanian President Klaus Johannis, describes the dilemma in the most poignantly human terms. Imagine a young Marxist-Leninist in an Eastern European country after WWII, Pralong writes. The Soviet army helps he and his comrades come to power. They fight against the local bourgeois “reactionaries” jail some, and even give orders to kill a few in order to consolidate power, because the ends justify the means. As the dominance of the party becomes entrenched, idealism slackens. The socialist utopia seems increasingly remote; people start to cut corners, to accept and offer bribes, and our friend becomes adept at distorting reality in order to avoid challenging official dogma. He lies about being an informant for the secret police; he lies about cheating on fulfilling his job quota (part of the top down economic Five-Year Plan). He lies to his children about the strength of his ideological convictions.
Then communism collapses, and competition is now the name of the game, and after years of watching people declare loyalty, receive protection, work seemingly for everybody, while doing as little as possible, he’s ready to pursue his self-interest openly. However, the east has now become a ‘wild west’ and one has to do things to survive. There is no safety net. The legal system is full of holes; the police and the courts are uneven at best, and corruption is everywhere, as in the past. So, to survive, our rationally self-interested friend takes a bribe here and there, lies from time to time, and cheats where he sees the chance so that he can stay ahead of the game.
While this is may be somewhat over-simplified, I believe that Pralong’s intention here is to remind us of what should be obvious, namely that, as Soros says, the collapse of repressive regimes does not necessarily lead to the establishment of an open society. Along with structural overhaul and institutional redesign needed to facilitate transformation from a centrally-planned economy and a repressive political apparatus to a market system and a democratic regime, Pralong says, following Soros, there actually needs to be a change in attitude. The Berlin Wall did not collapse into a vacuum — communism had encouraged a kind of widespread immorality, because people had to find whatever ways they could to survive in what Vaclav Havel called the communist “Absurdistan.”
Already by 1997, however, Soros’s optimism had become significantly tempered, and though he was still a Popperian, his experience had brought to the surface a series of doubts.
In order to build open societies, people need to abandon a ‘totalitarian ethics,’ Pralong says, where the ends everywhere justify the means, and agree instead to accept the procedural ethic that is the basis for the rule of law. But how is this supposed to work, she asks, given that Western societies with capitalist economies are replete with instrumental (means-ends) rationality, and liberalism generally invites individuals to freely choose their own ends, encouraging them primarily to pursue their own self-interests? There seems to be no easily apparent reason or incentive for rational individuals to renounce rational self-interestedness and to adopt a procedural ethics (voluntary submission to outcomes because they were arrived at in and through a democratically fair process).
Needless to say, there is nothing here that is especially unique to post-communist eastern Europe (except of course the parts that are). As far back as Rousseau, the Enlightenment tradition has struggled with the problem of how to find a practical-political concept of a volonte generale (a general will) that was somehow more than just the aggregate “will of all.” Following Marx, the Hungarian philosopher Georg Lukacs called this generally unresolved tension between the modern person as at once both ‘bourgeois homme et citoyen’ (middle class/family/merchant/capitalist and citizen) the ‘tragedy in the realm of the ethical.’
The Gangster State and the Open Society
In the early 1990s, the billionaire George Soros launched the Open Society Foundation, specifically with the aim of trying to bring about the required “change in attitude” necessary for the ideal of the open society to take root in eastern Europe. Already by 1997, however, Soros’s optimism had become significantly tempered, and though he was still a Popperian, his experience had brought to the surface a series of doubts. In a long piece published in the Atlantic Magazine that year, Soros offers up a kind of a revision. The Open Society had turned out to be a hard sell. The Western democracies had failed to rise to the occasion; and after the failure of communism, there came a general disillusionment with universal concepts — and the open society was a universal concept. Soros was not about to abandon his commitment to the open society; rather, he resolved to rethink it. The project, he wrote, needs to be reformulated as something more than a bulwark against totalitarianism. Whereas Popper was generally reacting against the power of the state, under both fascism and communism, to repress the freedom of the individual, Soros reflects, “I contend that an open society may also be threatened from the opposite direction — from excessive individualism.” The untrammeled intensification of laissez-faire capitalism and the spread of market values into all areas of life is endangering our open and democratic society, he writes. “The main enemy of the open society, I believe, is no longer the communist, but the capitalist threat…robber capitalism, or the gangster state as the new threat to the open society.”
In hindsight, Soros, writing this in 1997, was remarkable prescient. Popper’s work, at once wide-ranging and erudite, while also being somehow clumsy and uncomfortable (a philosopher of science who was also a man in dark times, trying to write as a social scientist) is still a kind of a beacon. But it has had to confront two developments that its author did not foresee; first, the problem of how to rapidly transition a closed society to an open one; and second, the fact that the major threat to the open society for the new century would come from ‘within rather than from without.’ With friends like these, it turns out, we don’t need enemies.
As indicated above, Popper’s work can still serve as a beacon, even if the threat to our ideal, since the collapse of communism, has turned out to be frenemies rather than enemies. On April 22nd, 2017, Trump resisters staged a series of “Science Marches” across the country. Embedded in most of the speeches was the assertion, not explicitly called out, that there is a close relationship, a special mutuality between the theory and practice of science and the political tradition of republican democracy.
In the next installment of this multi-part post, before returning to the matter of these frenemies, I will look at Popper’s Open Society and his Conjectures and Refutations in order to show how he goes about making this set of connections explicit for us.
