Illusionists, Brexit, and the ethics of belief

In 2003 the illusionist David Blaine, for reasons best known to his accountant, decided to spend 44 days in a transparent box suspended above the south bank of the River Thames. Out of “badness” I initiated an online rumour: that the French government was attempting to terminate the whole thing on the grounds that the box’s Plexiglass violated an EU directive on transparency conditions, and that, therefore, what we were “seeing” happening inside his box might involve an optical distortion. This distortion, I suggested, constituted a threat to the EU project. 

I started the rumour on a Friday evening. On the Sunday morning I heard it being reported as fact on LBC.

I’ve been wary of LBC ever since. I have considered it a willing vehicle of EU disinformation, but on Wednesday evening, had it not been for the nonsense-antennae of Iain Dale, it would have surpassed itself.

Here is what happened in the course of his (excellent) phone-in: in an obvious attempt at co-ordinated disinformation, and in fewer than ten minutes, three experts took up an invitation to discuss Mr Johnson’s letter to the EU, in which he proposes alternatives to the “backstop” provisions contained in Mrs May’s moribund Treaty. The guests (and I can’t be bothered to look it up in terms of their names) were a Green MEP from Finland, a backbench Labour MP not from Finland, and a Lib Dem MP from Edinburgh. Their responses to our PM’s letter, which had been published several hours earlier, marked out an impressive conceptual terrain: from Remain to How were the People allowed a vote in the first place? And guess what each guest had in common? This: that not one of them had seen fit to read the new proposals before seizing the LBC appearance fee.

Now, much like the Supreme Court, I am no expert on constitutional law. But given that I was interested in what these guests had to say, I decided to take some responsibility and read the letter beforehand (a quaintly naïve view, I know). It didn’t take long. It’s seven pages long, but nevertheless contains significant and substantive proposals.

It concedes a regulatory discrepancy between Northern Ireland and the rest of the UK by keeping NI within single market determinations for some goods (in particular agricultural ones). The discrepancy will be time-limited and will be underpinned by mechanisms of consent within the gift of newly-revived Stormont institutions. Contrary to the expected histrionics, there is a way of viewing this as an intensification of the Good Friday Agreement. Stormont’s most recent dissolution was a consequence of a hissy fit orchestrated by the unlamented Martin McGuinness. The children need to be reminded of their responsibilities.

On the Customs Union (CU): Johnson’s letter reiterates that in 2016 the constituent parts of the UK voted together, voted Leave, and that therefore we must leave as a political entity. You cannot leave an institution and remain implicated in its defining institution. The CU is not a purely economic arrangement: it is a straitjacket ordered in the direction of ever-increasing integration. This, necessarily, will imply customs checks “at the border”. This is a problem if by “border” you mean a geographical line in the ground. But if you mean “a virtual concept which is flexibly determined in accordance with developing technology” then there is no problem at all. Unless you insist on one. The Prime Minister’s proposals, if read carefully (or indeed at all) actually make an argument for the impossibility of a geographical border being coincident with a regulatory one.

Whatever you think of any of this, the PM’s submission constitutes an obvious change of emphasis when compared to the May nonsense, at a time when emphasis is becoming pretty exigent.

But the detail of Mr Johnson’s letter has fallen outside the attentions of those most keen to comment on it. Because people have already made their minds up. And I ascribe to these people an ethical failing. You are free to disagree with anything Mr Johnson has written, but only if you have read it. Philosophers (in a tradition that goes back to JS Mill) have recognised that there is such a thing as the “ethics of belief”. You can’t just choose to believe something if what you believe goes against something else you believe. You are not free to simply generate inconsistencies because it suits you.

Or if you are free to do that, then you take responsibility for it. If you believe that p implies q, and you also believe that p then you have an obligation to believe therefore q. If you don’t then I am free to call you an idiot.

And, similarly, when confronted with the evidence in front of you, a refusal to even look at it is an example of moral failure.

There is a normativity to human thought which, when disregarded, makes thought impossible. The MEP from Finland made an assertion about the contents of a document she hadn’t bothered to read. She elevated an intellectual laziness into a moral error.

I might be wrong in my interpretation of Johnson’s letter but at least I offered one. 

There will now be a “back and forth” between our Executive, the Remain Legislature, and the EU. The EU nomenclatura will be exploiting the ethical failure we are all guilty of: to comment on stuff we haven’t bothered to read.

It’s getting to the point where I think David Blaine might have had a point and that the best thing to do right now is to climb into a Perspex box and sit out the next 44 days with a good book. It might be an insane thing to do, but at least I won’t be inflicting it on the rest of you.