why you should read my substack if you love philosophy and hate monopsony

piece number 1 (part 1 of 2)

This is the first part of a two-part introductory piece. Here, I’ll explain why I set up this Substack, and try to convince you to read it. In the second part, I’ll discuss a recent opinion column I read, partly because I strongly disagreed with it, and partly because it offers me a route into explaining the name of this Substack. In future, my pieces will be less meta!

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TLDR: 

• Read my Substack if you’re looking for political writing by someone who’s free to argue whatever they find convincing, on whatever topics they feel justified to weigh in on, because they have no boss except themself.

• Read my Substack if you believe we should test each other’s ideas rigorously, and that we risk being disrespectful if we don’t take each other seriously in this way.  

• Read my Substack if you want a full-on philosophical experience.

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It might seem self-defeating to begin this introductory piece by admitting I rarely read political opinion columns. After all, this is a Substack where I’m planning to share my opinions about what’s going on in the world, and particularly in politics! But I think my admission is pretty apt.

First, I don’t mean I rarely read anything political. I spend lots of time reading political writing: reportage on politics, policy papers, works of philosophy about political ideas and events, interesting online pieces focused directly or indirectly on politics, and more. And I’ve done lots of this writing, myself. I used to write political journalism for various outlets. I once directed a think tank, and have worked as a researcher for several others. I have a PhD in political philosophy, and am writing a book about political freedom. I even ran for parliament one time (never again!) and wrote fortnightly about the experience. So rather, it’s that I’m finding it hard, these days, to bring myself to read opinion columns in the newspapers. And many of these columns are political, in one sense or another.

Second, a core reason I’ve gone off newspaper opinion columns, having once been a junkie for them, reflects a core reason for setting up this Substack. Increasingly, I watch newspaper columnists jumping on the trend — or tending towards the trend, in light of incentives they face — for writing superficial click-bait provocations. Many have become mechanical millers grinding out these weirdly counterintuitive, thinly contrarian, often morally horrible ‘arguments’, featuring little clarification or justification. These pieces not only degrade our discourse, and fuel bad action, they’re also really boring. And when it comes to opinion pieces, boring is sometimes worse than horrible.

In this context, one of the best features of Substack — as many writers have pointed out, and many thankfully have taken advantage of — is there’s no monopsonistic boss standing over your shoulder, clearing their throat while you rewrite your draft, taking out their calculator as the under-the-line comments amount.

This freedom of control over production and publication is attractive to me. The driving factor behind my work decisions is my instinctive aversion to authority: I don’t want anyone to be my boss, and I don’t want to be anyone else’s! This doesn’t mean I think there’s no such thing as justified authority. Of course there is: I’d go as far as saying that all real authority is justified authority, by definition. It also doesn’t mean I think authority has no place in a good society. Of course it does: it’s necessary to many central features of such a place, not least determining who gets a say in what (I’m a hardcore democratic decentralist!). Instead all I mean is that for as long as I’m able, I’m willing to take the trade, and go it alone work-wise — to be self-employed, to run my writing and research through my own limited company, to take and drop opportunities in line with my own evaluations — regardless of the insecurities this risks.

About a decade ago, when I was first working in think-tank-land, I discovered, five minutes after signing a full-time employment contract, that I would not be ‘allowed’ to write on certain political topics, for that think tank or any other outlet, and neither was anyone else there. I understand some of the reasoning of my former boss on this. But that’s the kind of authority I want to lie solely with me.

One benefit, therefore, I hope the readers of this Substack will enjoy, is my relative lack of fear. I’m happy to write about any topic I feel justified to weigh in on, and to make any argument I’m convinced by. Not only do I have less to lose than many other people (no boss to sack me!), but being able to do so reflects why I run my life like this: to be able to speak freely. Over the past couple of years, I’ve written many times on the topic of sex and gender, for instance: a topic lots of people feel unable to discuss, and some have even faced legal action and physical threats for doing so, as well as employment uncertainty. I’ll write about it again, here, if I decide there’s something more I want to say.

This Substack set-up will allow me to do more than discuss the topics I choose, however. It’ll also allow me to discuss them in the ways I value, and think I’m good at. When I’ve written political comment pieces for other outlets, editors have mostly humoured, and sometimes appreciated, my love of philosophy, and its impact on the content and style of my writing. But here, I don’t have to hold back. Here, you can expect a full-on philosophical experience.

If you know me in person, you’ll know I can’t go more than five minutes without getting on to philosophy. This is one of my worst features. Partly because it turns out many people simply don’t want conversations about everyday things to become conversations focused on drawing distinctions between concepts, or conversations in which the topic at hand is analogised or theorised away. But also because, as one of my favourite people often points out, doing philosophy is inherently oppositional. By agreeing with them on this, I definitely don’t mean that philosophers have to be aggressive or arrogant or dismissive, or that they should be these things (and neither do they!). Rather, I mean doing philosophy always involves taking ideas seriously. It involves rigorously testing them. It involves open-minded, non-predetermined, discursive committed engagement.

I love this. I find it more fulfilling than anything else. I find it fun (even when, substantively, it’s not). And I find it otherwise valuable in many ways. I’ve always believed that if you don’t take other people’s ideas seriously — in this sense of considering and evaluating their ideas with rigour — then you’re at serious risk of failing to show those people the respect you owe them. Having grown up in a family of philosophers, I’ve held this belief since before I realised that I did. And it’s cost me often, since then. I’ve learned that showing this kind of respect can piss off (and even hurt) your friends, and the other people you engage with. Although I hope, over time, I’ve found better ways to do it. And often, to stop myself from doing it (out loud, at least). It also took me time to accept this is how I am, and want to be: as a self-avowed individualist, it didn’t come easy to enter the ‘family business’.

But that’s more than enough about me. This idea about ‘showing respect through taking each other’s ideas seriously’ brings me to the second part of this piece. There, in response to a Matthew Syed column I read last weekend, I’m going to argue that if we respect one another as we should, then we cannot back each other ‘100 per cent’. This second part includes the proper bits of this piece, therefore, in that I’m keen to avoid overly-inward-reflection on this Substack. I’ll excuse it for now, because I want you to know my motivations for writing here. But in future, I’ll try to be much less meta.