The Unpersuadables: Adventures with the Enemies of Science (33 page)

And so, the Communist crosshairs fell upon Britain. We had links not only with the United States, but also with the Commonwealth and the European Union. If you brought down the United Kingdom, our ties with the rest of the world would stretch and pull as we tumbled into the void, wrenching damaging chunks from everyone else. We might even pull some of them in behind us. That was the grim plot that lay behind the miners’ strike of the mid-1980s. It was a new front in the cold war, triggered by prominent Britons who had been covertly trained in Muscovite terrorist universities. The Communists hoped that the strikes would fatally damage our energy infrastructure and thereby threaten the ‘most popular government in modern times’ – that of the woman who, by then, was Lord Monckton’s boss, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.

Lord Monckton’s record in government, as recounted by Lord Monckton, speaks of a man of prescient counsel whose advice, if heeded,
would have prevented the flowering of evil in many spheres. If the world had followed his advice during the AIDS crisis, to offer one example, millions of lives would have been saved. He described his views at length in an article for the
American Spectator
, published in January 1987:

Today, he insists that his article was ‘very reasonable’ and he has been unfairly quoted by people who fail to mention the paragraph where he says, ‘of course the isolation does not need to be prison camps, or shoving them on an island somewhere. The simplest thing is, you just test everybody, tell them if they’ve got it, then they can isolate themselves. I’m a great believer in trusting people.’ Which is all very mysterious because I read the entire piece only yesterday and, as I explain to Lord Monckton now, I don’t remember reading
anything
like that. He mentions, rather vaguely, things that he ‘went on to say in subsequent articles.’ So, you know, I’m sure it’s all fine, and the main point is if they had listened to Lord Monckton in the first place, then AIDS would have been ‘practically stopped it in its tracks.’

Likewise, the global financial crisis. Lord Monckton saw it coming. Ultimately, he tells me, the economic terrors from which we are currently suffering are the result of the left’s attempts at destroying capitalism, ‘by making it terribly rich. They have learned that if you concentrate wealth in the hands of a few, they become resented then …’

‘It is overthrown!’ I gasp, barely believing what I am hearing. ‘Of course!’

‘Oh, yes,’ he agrees. ‘It’s all part of the same picture.’

But, as everybody has been compelled to acknowledge, flaws in the level of banking regulation are also to blame for the crash. Indeed, Lord Monckton spent four years at No. 10, objecting to what one day would become the Financial Services Act, the legislation that would come to seed our economic downfall. ‘But literally a month after I left Downing Street, the civil service pushed it through.’

‘So that was deregulation?’ I clarify.

He looks amazed.

‘No, no, no. It was imposing, for the first time, the most staggering over-regulation in the city of London.’

I sit up.

‘Hang on,’ I said. ‘I thought the banks began to behave badly because of a loosening of the rules –
de
regulation.’

‘No, completely the opposite.’

‘Really?’

‘Oh, completely. I was there, you see. I said to Margaret, “For God’s sake, don’t go anywhere near this catastrophe.” What happened was, people began to believe that because it was so heavily regulated, they could put their money into whatever financial instrument they chose and it would be safe.’

‘So all that regulation gave everyone false confidence?’

‘Absolutely. Entirely false sense of security. The result was that the banks then began messing around doing all these complicated credit-default swaps and you see what happened.’

Another crucial event that was taking place during Lord Monckton’s time in government was the miners’ strike. One of his recollections of those tense days begins with him sitting in his office in Downing Street as future cabinet minister Oliver Letwin came running in.

‘Oh, it’s terrible, it’s terrible, where do we hide?’ wailed Letwin. ‘The miners are rioting in Parliament Square. It’s so un-English!’

But Lord Monckton knew better. ‘Don’t be so silly!’ he admonished the young Letwin. ‘This is just what they do every Friday evening when the pubs tip out.’

Letwin, however, was frantic.

‘They’re coming this way!’ he cried.

Lord Monckton glanced out of the window. Hmm, yes. There were thirty or forty of them by now, pressing against the rickety barriers. More still were arriving. But Lord M was not in the least perturbed.

‘Oh, well,’ he sighed while slipping on his overcoat. ‘I’ll just go and deal with that.’

And then he reached for his bowler hat. Letwin was agog.
A bowler hat?

‘They’ll lynch you!’

‘Of course they won’t,’ said Lord Monckton.

‘What do you mean?’

‘Look, why do I wear a hat in situations like this? It’s the only way to make a polite gesture at a distance. This has been known to my ancestors since time immemorial. It ran the empire. If you wanted to indicate politeness to people who were charging you, you took your hat off to them and they stopped. It works every time. Just watch!’

Lord Monckton descended the steps of No. 10 and approached the angry miners, passing a pair of policemen who were nervously radioing for reinforcements. The revolting pitmen saw him. They began jeering. When Lord Monckton was halfway along Downing Street he suddenly stopped. He surveyed the horde. He took a breath. And he doffed.

Immediately, the jeering turned to cheering. Lord Monckton approached the men, promised to put their complaints in a note to Margaret Thatcher, and then offered them a pint. ‘And you could have heard a pin drop,’ he remembers, smiling. ‘They were all docile and followed me across the road to the pub in double file. It was like a schoolmaster and his crocodile.’

Since the years of his heroic calming of Downing Street, the cold war might have ended, but the power-mad left, he tells me, remain a perilous threat.

‘Once they had been motivated in these directions by the Communists, then these organisations took on a life of their own,’ he says. ‘They are essentially still following the KGB playbook without being
aware that they’re doing so. It’s absolutely the same pattern. The main thing is power. That is the fundamental principle of leftism. It’s about this absolute control over every detail, which is why the correct word for left is “totalitarianism”.’

And today, the enemy – in the modern form of the European Union and the United Nations – appear to be winning.

‘You don’t know who they are. You can’t really see them. But everybody in this
classe politique
is now beginning to argue for global governance.’ He tells me that the UN held a meeting last May ‘with all of its top people, to discuss ways of bringing the “nation state” to an end. It’s code for bringing democracy to an end. That’s actually at the top of the UN’s agenda.’ An early draft of the 2009 Copenhagen Treaty, he adds menacingly, ‘describes that they’re going to establish a global government.’

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the environmental groups and many politicians sympathetic to the IPCC’s views are part of this plan to institute what Lord Monckton has previously called
‘a worldwide coup d’état by bureaucrats’
who seek to ‘impose a Communist world government on the world.’

And the people know it. Well, they don’t
know
it, just know it. Not the details, the
facts
. They just have this hunch, you see. This intuition. This generalised emotion. Who knows where it comes from? When they hear Lord Monckton speak, they realise this
feeling
they have always had was true all along and, when they do, they react with such rapture, such
jubilation
.

‘I began giving talks all over the place,’ he tells me. ‘Australia, America, Europe. Huge crowds would turn up and they would jump around – standing ovations practically every time. It was clear that there was a large feeling among ordinary people that something was going on in this climate story that they didn’t like the smell of. They
knew
there was. They just couldn’t quite work out what it was …’

*

When I spoke with Professor Jonathan Haidt, I was surprised to find him offering some advice that Lord Monckton might have approved
of. ‘Follow the sacredness,’ he told me. ‘Find out what people believe to be sacred, and when you look around there you will find rampant irrationality. The left have sacralised global warming. I am very certain, as a moral psychologist, that their discourse about it is not rational. They cannot be trusted to think straight about it. It’s a classic moral crusade. And when a scientific community is all on one side, morally and politically, then its ability to be objective goes out the window. Unfortunately, this is the case with global warming. I believe that the scientists are correct, but we can’t be
as
confident, because there are tribal dynamics going on.’

Professor Haidt believes that, as well as global warming, the left have ‘sacralised victims and demonised capitalism’ while the right have sacralised markets. ‘They can’t think straight about the ability of the markets to solve problems.’ Perhaps comfortingly, he argues that the endless war between the political poles represents a relatively efficient model of governance. ‘The most basic question that faces any society is change versus stick,’ he asserts. ‘Stay with what you have and know, or change and strike out into the future. And there is no correct answer – you have to have a balance of both.’

It was remarkable to observe how many of the battles of Lord Monckton were in the service of ‘stick’. His emotional instincts were to conserve the world, to defend hierarchy and order and tradition. He is an archetypal conservative.

But perhaps the most surprising thing that I discovered, as I was conducting my research into our political brains, is that allegiances are not defined by simple, calculating self-interest.

The studies that Professor Haidt has been involved with, and the data that he has been exposed to, have convinced him into a darker vision than the traditional one. We do not use free will in order to select beliefs and behaviours that will make the world a better place. In
The Righteous Brain
,
he writes that moral reasoning ‘evolved not to help us find truth
but to help us engage in arguments, persuasion and manipulation in the context of discussions with other people.’

In this alternative vision, the brain wants to make us into heroes in the eyes of those around us and also in our own. The stories we
believe, and the demons that we imagine surround us, all tend to serve a crucial narrative – that we are exceptional, that we are morally holy, that we are on a meaningful journey, and that we are
right
.

And my encounter with Lord Monckton has also given me something extra – an unexpected method by which I believe we can spot faulty beliefs. Yesterday, the philosopher Dr James Garvey told me, ‘Most people would say that something’s true if it corresponds to the way the world is. This view goes back to Aristotle. But there are other people who prefer the coherence theory of truth, which says that if you have a completely coherent set of beliefs, that tends to be a true set of beliefs.’

Over the last few days, I have become convinced that the coherence theory could not be more wrong. If a person’s set of beliefs all cohere, it means that they are telling themselves a highly successful story. It means that their confabulation is so rich and deep and all-enveloping that almost every living particle of nuance and doubt has been suffocated. Which says to me, their brains are working brilliantly, and their confabulated tale is not to be trusted.

*

I am walking through the courtyard of the Oxford Union, back towards the station, when I see a pair of young students laughing as they stride into the entrance. I get that thud, again. That feeling.
Avoid, dislike, unclean.
My left-brain interpreter seeks to explain, to justify. And I want to say,
spoiled
. I want to say,
privileged
. I want to say,
glad I never went to university
. But none of that would be true. What my emotions are really a response to is something that is utterly heretical to the story that I have always told of my life.

It is envy.

1 SEPTEMBER

Mid-afternoon

The assistant to Hitler’s ambassador
is a blonde and beautiful young American. I met her in the lobby of the grand Polonia Palace Hotel in central Warsaw, where she was ticking off arrivals for the week-long tour of Second World War sites that is being hosted by the ambassador himself, the notorious right wing historian David Irving. Her name is Jaenelle Antas, and she has a measured and precise way of speaking that hints at artifice but is, I suspect, nonetheless indicative of a superior intelligence. I felt a sudden constriction of nerves when I saw her. She smiled and said, ‘One or two of your fellow tour members are getting to know one another in the cocktail lounge. Perhaps you would care to join them?’

The room was draped about with glamorous Poles. There were bow-tied cocktail waiters, flavoured cashews served in white pots laid out on black napkins and, hanging from the ceiling, an enormous statement lampshade. I found the men up on stools, drinking lager at the bar – an American named Mark and an Australian called Alex, both in their mid-to-late thirties. They chatted harmlessly about toy models (‘I prefer dioramas. Planes, armour. German. Mostly 1:35.’) as a waiter washed glasses at the other side of the bar. I bought drinks and relaxed a little, satisfied now that these men were smart enough not to say anything obviously offensive.