A presumption among many thoughtful people is that the great enemy of a good life and
a decent world is something called ‘bias’. By bias, people have come to understand a
twisting of the facts towards dark and entirely negative ends. According to this interpretation,
bias is invariably and necessarily bad. In some quarters, the word has simply grown synonymous
with evil. In order to hate bias so much, one has to love the idea of something else
with equal passion: ‘the facts’. People hate bias because they ultimately believe
in the redemptive possibility of something completely objective, and scientifically verifiable.
Loathing of bias is the flipside of faith in facts. Facts evidently exist in many areas
of life. Science and many of the human sciences are beautifully based on evidence-based, fact-yielding
work. The problem is that in many of the most important aspects of existence, there simply
are no ‘facts’ available. The big questions that bedevil us, individually and collectively,
have no facts to appeal to. – How should we live? – what is the right economic system
to institute? – what sort of relationships should we have? – what choices should we
make? – Who are we and what do we want and need? In the face of such dilemmas, we may
well long for facts – by which we really mean, answers we can be assured will be indisputably
correct. But we invariably face ambiguity and, whatever answers we formulate, a degree
of loss, and the risk of blindness and error. It is these elements which the haters of bias
are, deep down, especially intolerant towards and upset about. Their hatred of bias reflects
a longing for a world without a need for hard choices and the sacrifice these necessarily
entail. We may well long to ‘stick to facts,’ but we eventually have to try to lead our
lives according to values, which are inherently much more contentious and complicated structures.
There is no merely fact-based road to a good and contented life. The passion against bias
often comes to a head in our thinking about news organisations. In certain circles, there
is a particular loathing for what is termed biased news – and a belief in the option
of decent news organisations which are going to always and inherently be unbiased. Unfortunately,
there is simply no way of providing factual, ‘unbiased’ answers to the really big issues
facing societies. News organisations that vaunt their neutrality forget that neutrality
is simply impossible vis a vis the really urgent questions confronting our civilisation.
The word ‘bias’ ultimately simply alludes to the business of having a ‘take’ on
existence. One may have a better or worse take, but one needs a take. One needs eventually
to tackle the question of what is important, just, worth striving for. If news or information
or even philosophy are to matter to us, really matter, they will have to be presented to
us by organisations that have tried to think through the ends of human life, that have
a vision of where we are trying to go as a species, and that have somewhere articulated
their answers to their audiences. The issue is not – therefore – the illusory and
timid one between bias and fact but between better and worse varieties of bias. We should
never knock (to take the most obvious examples) America’s Fox News or Britain’s Daily
Mail just on the basis that they are biased, we should only ever argue that they seem badly
biased. That is the battle to fight. We also need an extension of our sense of what sort
of bias can exist. At present, we are used to thinking of bias simply in terms of right
and left. But this is a radical reduction in the kinds of bias that are theoretically
available to us. We don’t always have to limits things to a choice between blue and
red. We might discover a bias in favour of the wisdom of Montaigne, the dark consoling
pessimism of Schopenhauer or the wit and humanity of Marcel Proust. We could be biased towards
ambiguity, cheerful despair or sane insanity. Our societies would be richer if we were better,
not at stripping facts of bias, but at developing our capacities for higher bias. All individuals
and organisations – even ones like the BBC, Wikipedia or a great university – in fact,
believe in all sorts of things deep down; they aren’t as neutral as they want us to
think – and that’s an extremely good thing. It’s high time for them to stop hiding behind
a false defence of their factual impartiality and to come out from behind the shadows with
a clear articulation of their vision of a good society. It’s time for biases to conflict
openly, as part of a healthy democratic process. We don’t need our information stripped of
bias, we need to evolve our way, through a clash of ideologies, towards the best kinds
of bias. Furthermore, we’ll have matured when we start to know what our own biases
really are – and so start to get less prickly and touchy about the biases of others.
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