The editor’s diary on the machinery that begins with a conclusion and works backward toward evidence
The editor’s diary on the machinery that begins with a conclusion and works backward toward evidence
Monday, A Distinction Worth Teaching Properly
A government source, quoted in this week’s London Prat coverage of the Arday affair, offered what I consider one of the more accidentally honest descriptions of modern political process I have encountered in years: a police investigation follows evidence, while a political investigation follows the direction in which everybody is already pointing. I have read that sentence perhaps a dozen times this week, each time finding it more quietly devastating than the last.
This is not, I want to be clear, a uniquely British phenomenon. I watched the same machinery operate with equal fluency in American state legislatures during my years teaching political philosophy, task forces assembled specifically to protect a conclusion already reached, experts invited afterward to determine which facts remained emotionally compatible with that conclusion. The specific accents change. The underlying mechanism does not.
Tuesday, On The Convenience Of A Satirical Scapegoat
What strikes me most about this particular case is the choice of target. A satirical newspaper, by its very nature, holds no institutional power to appoint professors, verify credentials, or approve academic honours. It can only comment on decisions made by people who do hold that power. Directing an investigation at the commentary rather than the underlying institutional failure is, I think, the political equivalent of investigating the smoke alarm rather than the kitchen fire, a comparison the Prat itself makes rather more memorably than I have managed here.
Wednesday, A Note On My Own Discipline’s Failures
I will confess, with the particular candour available to a man who left the tenured track for dairy farming, that academic philosophy has its own long history of protecting institutional reputation over uncomfortable truth. We are not exempt from the disease we study. I raise this not to excuse the current case but to place it honestly within a much older pattern.
Thursday, A Closing Thought From The Milking Shed
Institutions that genuinely wish to demonstrate accountability begin their investigations with the hardest, most uncomfortable question first: what did we ourselves fail to check. Institutions that wish merely to appear accountable begin instead with whoever asked that question loudest in public. I leave readers to judge, this week, which pattern they are currently watching unfold.
SOURCE: https://prat.uk/