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Popper's return engagement: The open society in an era of globalization

National Interest, The, Spring, 2002 by Neil McInnes

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This paradox can be problematic. Just as The Open Society and Its Enemies began its long and successful career there set in a massive historical drift with all the force of inevitability that no one could resist: the dissolution of Europe's overseas empires. Even colonies that had no wish for "freedom" were cut loose by metropoles that knew they were doing wrong--take Papua New Guinea, for example--because the winds of change were blowing so hard that resistance was useless.

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Or take the case of the collapse of communism and the disintegration of the Soviet empire, which seem to us now to have been inevitable and seemed so beforehand to a few wise men and women. Because Popper feels obliged to deny that anything happens for more than contingent, meaningless, accidental reasons, he argued, shortly after the fall of the Soviet Union: "First, the Soviet regime might have lasted longer still, perhaps forever; it was not some law or destiny but a series of definite events--and definite decisions taken by real-life people at their own risk--which brought about its collapse." (6) But this is preposterous. Was nothing more general proven, nothing about the necessary failure of central planning, nothing about the inevitable bankruptcy of tyrannies that deny intellectual freedom? If communism collapsed almost by accident, why not start again but be more careful next time?

Come the Culture Cult

POPPER'S political nominalism and voluntarism did not diminish his faith that the transition from the closed to the open society was proper, necessary and ultimately inevitable for all peoples. So he must have been astonished by the rise of the "culture cult", the doctrine that closed societies must be protected from modernization since all cultures are equally valuable and deserving of preservation; as Ranke would say, each is unmittelbar zu Gott. (7) To see how opinions have changed on this, one might consider one of the few references Popper made to the Maori when he lived eight years among them. In The Open Society he says, "The early Greek tribal society resembles in many respects that of peoples like the Polynesians, the Maoris for instance. Small bands of warriors, usually living in fortified settlements, ruled by tribal chiefs or kings, or by aristocratic families, were waging war against one another on sea as well as on land." There were differences, of course, but the two tribal societies had in com mon "their magical or irrational attitude towards the customs of social life, and the corresponding rigidity of those customs." For all I know, the Maori of that day would (apart from frowning at the incorrect plural "Maoris") have taken no offense, perhaps have been flattered, by this comparison with the ancient Greeks. Not so today.

Today Popper's comparison would be seen as an inconsiderate and possibly racist reminder that until 1840 the Maori lived in a cruel, ignorant, authoritarian society, "closed intellectually, socially and politically", devoted to perpetual warfare, environmental depredation and cannibalism--not occasional ritual cannibalism but cannibalism as a regular source of food. Roger Sandall says, "A long century of moral transfiguration has finally reached its apogee. With the cosmetic improvements of sundry members of the Culture Cult, only the most decorous and edifying version of the Polynesian past is allowed on public view--a genteel world of wise ecologists, mystical sages, gifted artists, heroic navigators, and pacifists who would not hurt a fly."(8)

Popper's return engagement: The open society in an era of globalization

National Interest, The, Spring, 2002 by Neil McInnes

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