Grey-sky thinking

This week: the trouble with centrism; in search of the most densely populated patch of Great Britain; and some notes on clouds.

I’ve always hated the suggestion I’m a centrist. Partly this is because that’s not remotely how I see myself or my politics, and being told the sky is bright green is annoying. Partly, it’s because it’s generally used as a way of saying “You’re not in our gang”, and guess what, that can be annoying, too. But I’ve realised there’s another reason: my increasingly strong prior that “centrism” rots your brain.

The standard models of the possible range of political views consist of either a spectrum, running left to right, or, for the slightly more advanced, a compass, with economics on one axis and social matters on the others. The word “centrist” implies a position somewhere in the middle: not too hot, not too cold. 

But what if these models are misleading? What if, actually, all we have is just a basket of views, which don’t necessarily correlate to a single, coherent position on a graph? In Mostly Harmless, Douglas Adams eschewed the simplistic notion of parallel universes in favour of the Whole Sort of General Mishmash theory of cosmology, which I think may also be useful here: 

“Any given universe is not actually a thing as such, but is just a way of looking at what is technically known as the WSOGMM, or Whole Sort of General Mish Mash. The Whole Sort of General Mish Mash doesn’t actually exist either, but is just the sum total of all the different ways there would be of looking at it if it did. The reason [parallel universes] are not parallel is the same reason that the sea is not parallel. It doesn’t mean anything. You can slice the Whole Sort of General Mish Mash any way you like and you will generally come up with something that someone will call home.”

As with Adams’ universe, so with political views. The labels we slap onto them are a convenient way of gauging and communicating, very roughly, where someone fits. But they don’t define what they think, any more than the fact I am English defines my views on tea. (Can’t stand the stuff.) So while a centrist may hold moderate positions on many, even most, things, that doesn’t mean they take a moderate stance on everything.

None of this is a problem for any self-defined centrist who’s actually aware of this, of course. But what if your model for understanding political opinion is the spectrum/compass one, and you’ve invested a lot in the belief you’re a sensible, rational, thoughtful moderate, whose political beliefs are not too hot, not too cold? You might start to assume that any view you hold must be a sensible, rational, thoughtful, moderate one, merely by virtue of the fact that you hold it. 

The problem is, under our Whole Sort of General Mish Mash model of political opinion, it isn’t – you may perhaps be less likely to hold an extreme or batshit view than someone to your left or right, though frankly I’m increasingly unconvinced of that, either; but it’s still entirely possible. All your sensible, rational, etc. model of yourself has done is give you an excuse not to analyse your own prejudices and to assume they can’t possibly be irrational.

And so, suddenly you are going around talking as if the fact you’re uncomfortable with a particular group of people means that is actually a sensible, rational, thoughtful, moderate prejudice to hold. After all, you aren’t a bigot – you’re a centrist. So there must be something wrong with those people!

That’s one issue I have with “centrism” – the fact that people who self-define as such frequently seem to zoom off into all sorts of insane viewpoints without ever questioning whether they’ve actually just gone nuts. But there is another.

In the excellent Origin Story podcast, Dorian Lysnkey and Ian Dunt – two guys who I suspect don’t enjoy getting called “centrist” either – discuss the origin, history and meaning of political terms. One episode concerns the word “centrist”.

And what they concluded is it’s meaningless: defined as it is by the bounds of left and right in whatever society it’s currently being defined by, there’s not really any such thing as “centrist” values. There’s no there there.

It’s not just that the word is devoid of content: it can also move. The centrist view on, say, gay rights has jumped a long way to the left in the last forty years; the centrist view on tax policy and the workings of the economy meanwhile has jumped way to the right. When someone who might have been a moderate in the Callaghan years can end up aligned with whatever UKIP¹ is calling itself these days without changing any of their views even slightly, you have to ask whether “centrist” is actually any use as a label.

So: centrism is untethered. Centrism rots your brain. Please don’t call me a centrist.

Map(-based investigation) of the Week

Friend of the newsletter Alasdair Rae has been trying to find the most densely populated square kilometre of the UK. Here it is now: