Will you join me in the alt-centre?

In this video Peyton Bowman and I explore aspects of my blog post "Will you join me in the alt-centre?". I initially coined the term “alt-centre” light-heartedly, but, like many such things, having put it up there, I think it might be about something real. 

An earlier iteration of my centrism is here.  But that was then. 

Now I’d say, how about a fusion of Alasdair MacIntyre, James Burnham and George Orwell together with the idea that outputs from modern academia are mostly useless?  

And, in this discussion, as I do in my post, we explore James Burnham's argument that over nine-tenths of political discussion — from the heights of political theory right down to discussions in the street is fatally infected with wish fulfilment, rather than a proper engagement with the problems of the world and what we can practically do about them.   

I illustrate this by referring to the much relied on the distinction between equality of opportunity and equality of outcome noting that neither actually exists in the world. They're abstractions. More to the point, if you give one generation equality of opportunity, its children will not have equality of opportunity because the children of people who've not done well will start disadvantaged. And yet the concept is bandied about in political discussion as if it were far more determinative than it is.

We go on to discuss a range of questions such as the role that our values — and our wishes — should play in political discussion and the way in which various practices associated with wokedom, often have more to do with organisations protecting themselves from risk than they do with helping address difficult issues. As such, when organisations regulate conduct to take these ideas into account, they often do so to make them disappear rather than to engage with them. These ideas are explored further in this blog post.