The Open Society and its Enemies

"Popper is a very personal choice. I saw him lecture at the London School of Economics. I was a working class boy who was given the chance of going to university in the early eighties and attended the LSE. I had a sense of being different. I had a sense of self that my grandfather helped instill – he was old school Labour, and a communist. He thought that you should make something of yourself in the world, to take what you have and make an impact. My father was German, raised in Nazi Germany, so I have a very clear sense of the wrongs that were committed in Nazi Germany. Karl Popper was a grand figure of philosophy at the LSE then. I was already prepped to receive his wisdom as I knew he’d come from Vienna, I knew he was a refugee from Nazism, so it was a natural association. So there were very personal reasons I had for going to hear him lecture. “How could I, as a 3- or 4-year-old, understand that someone didn’t like me because of the colour of my skin? You’re not conscious of skin colour at that age unless others have made you conscious of it.” But when I went to the lecture, I realised I was the only person of colour in that packed lecture theatre. He talked about the enemies of the open society. It struck me that one of the enemies of the open society was exclusion. Popper doesn’t discuss colour, but he does talk about those who are ‘in’ and those who are ‘out,’ those who are part of the process, and those who are not part of the process. In the early 1980s we’d had riots in Brixton, riots in Toxteth. I’d been involved in riots in Broadwater Farm—not throwing Molotov cocktails, I should add—I just happened to be there by accident. That context meant that I really wanted to delve into the questions Popper was asking, especially the question: Who is democracy for? Popper thought it was mostly about keeping the demagogues and dictators out, not about getting the democrats in. His book helped me to think in a different way about society. It gave me a strategy of looking for an alternative narrative, of testing the dominant position. As a journalist, it made me much more sceptical when I was presented with the dominant line: a little voice in the back of my head said, ‘Really? Let’s think of the alternative proposition here.’ In that way, Popper’s book was important for me. It gave me a kind of epiphany and helped shape a method of seeking the alternative narrative."