October 8, 2010
The Passing of Blair Rage
I used to be angry with Tony Blair. Really angry. About the Iraq war (especially). About his continuation of Thatcher’s legacy. About the assault on civil liberties. About the wasted opportunities which followed the two largest Labour majorities in history.
But I’ve recently started to change my assessment of the man himself. And my anger is mutating into something else.
Take David Runciman’s unmissable review of Blair’s memoirs in the LRB. It is focused on two defining features of Blair’s premiership: his 10-year battle with Gordon Brown (or rather, his 10-year resistance to the assassin next door), and his decision to back an American invasion of Iraq. In Runciman’s withering assessment, Blair not only got two of his biggest decisions wrong, he got them the wrong way around.
The time to be decisive and head-strong was mid-2001, after Labour had been returned with a second landslide. Blair could have dispatched Brown there and then. The rest of his premiership, and New Labour’s record, would have been profoundly different. The time for hesitancy and refusal to land a body-blow was 2002-3, when the American war effort was going into full effect. But instead Blair embarked on the worst foreign policy disaster in British post-war history.
Runciman’s assessment is broadly shared by Andrew Rawnsley in his The End of the Party. Yet what comes through most clearly in Rawnsley’s treatment is what a terrible judge of situations, and what an ineffectual decision-maker, Blair was at crucial junctures.
Blair lacked the stomach for a fight with Brown, and mistakenly thought he could charm Bush out of bellicosity. The result was disaster at home and in the middle east. Yet what Rawnsley claims, in particular, is that on crucial occasions Blair made shockingly bad political decisions: he brokered lop-sided bargains with Brown that left him totally exposed; he pledged unconditional support to Bush and thereby forfeited any potential British leverage. There are many more examples.
I had long assumed that image of Blair projected whilst in office reflected the real thing: a supremely talented politician with a ruthless Machiavellian gift for the back rooms of politics, combined perfectly with the buckets of charisma that made him a media-manipulating genius.
What Rawnsley (and to a lesser extent, Runciman) bring out is the extent to which Blair charmed and bluffed his way to the top, believing in his own vacuous rhetoric along the way. Yet when the really big moments came he turned out to be made more of straw than steel. For a politician so obsessed with his legacy, Blair may end up very disappointed with how history remembers him.
But two other things have also influenced my reassessment. First, over at Potlatch Will Davies has a very funny – but also incisive – post suggesting that Blair is incapable of feeling embarrassment. Read it; there’s definitely something there.
Second was Chris Brooke’s epic (and slightly bonkers) marathon tweeting of A Journey. What struck me reading Chris’ summary was the extent to which Blair was apparently deluded in his basic grasp of the world. Indeed I asked Chris if he shared this impression, and he replied:
“Yes — I think he has become a fantasist. He says at the end that he’s much happier now he’s out of office, and obviously part of that is that he doesn’t have to deal with Gordon Brown or the British media every day, but I also wonder whether part of it is that he isn’t so constrained by the real world any more, and so can just live in a fantasy of his own construction.
The final chapter of the book seems pretty delusional to me — as Blair insists he is “progressive” while defending an exceptionally right-wing approach to dealing with the economic crisis which involves low direct taxes on rich people, allowing banks to write new rules for regulation, jacking up indirect consumption taxes, & so on.”
These two factors – the dispelling of the illusion of Blair as political colossus, and the possibility that he may actually be psychologically unhinged – have had the effect of making me considerably less angry at Blair. I’m still – don’t get me wrong – angry at what happened over those 10 years. But towards Blair himself I’m starting to feel something decidedly different: a bizarre form of condescending pity.
Again, I’m fairly sure that’s not the sort of legacy Blair had in mind for himself. Fittingly, that compounds my emotive revaluation of him.
September 10, 2010
Gideon Osborne and the Dodo of Keynes
Last night, the heir to a multimillion pound fortune declared that it is wrong for people to get money for doing nothing.
This came as part of a special announcement that £4billion more would be cut from benefits than previously planned. This was certainly not part of a transparent and obvious ploy to get the News of the World/Met Police phone-hacking scandal off the front pages.
In turn, the irony of a party which recently appointed a big-time tax avoider to a senior role – and which has turned a blind eye to a practice costing the UK many more sums than benefit “scrounging” – was quickly lost on everybody. Most especially, it was lost on Lib Dem members of the (so-called) Coalition (but in practice, Tory) government. Politicians who, until their recent emasculation and co-option into perennial shit-can-carrying policy gimps for their Conservative Dominatrix, had seemed quite genuine about plugging that c.£25 billion-a-year tax gap.
But hey, this is politics. And there’s alotta newspaper inches available for bashing the scroungers. Because everybody hates those bastards. With their £65.45 a week. Living the life of riley. On £65.45 a week. The fuckers.
However, enough dripping sarcasm and contempt. Gideon Osborne’s announcement is interesting because it heralds – or at the very least, confirms – the death of an idea. And not just any old idea. One that had an enormous impact on the 20th century, insofar as it shaped the post-war economic and social consensus and helped guarantee that liberal capitalist democracy would be a superior state form to fascism and communism.
I’m not an economist (by any means), but I have read John Maynard Keynes’s The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money. This passage gets to the heart of things:
“Obviously, however, if the classical theory is only applicable to the case of full employment, it is fallacious to apply it to the problems of involuntary unemployment — if there be such a thing (and who will deny it?). The classical theorists resemble Euclidean geometers in a non-Euclidean world who, discovering that in experience straight lines apparently parallel often meet, rebuke the lines for not keeping straight as the only remedy for the unfortunate collisions which are occurring. Yet, in truth, there is no remedy except to throw over the axiom of parallels and to work out a non-Euclidean geometry. Something similar is required today in economics. We need to throw over the second postulate of the classical doctrine and to work out the behaviour of a system in which involuntary unemployment in the strict sense is possible.”
A core part of Keynes’ subsequent analysis was that unemployment is a function of aggregate demand. Which basically means: if the economy is buggered, then there won’t be enough jobs for all those willing to work. Fiddling around at the margins – say, by reducing unemployment benefit – will not make a significant difference. When there’s no jobs, there’s no jobs. Accordingly, the government should do something to sort that out, namely by stimulating demand until private enterprise benefits from the upward swing and expands to fill the vacuum.
Yet this idea is apparently as dead as a dodo. The Chancellor of the Exchequer stands up, and with a straight face says he’s going to cut benefits to force the able-bodied into work. At a time when there simply are no jobs to be had in many parts of the country. When public service cuts are destroying those that do exist.
40 years ago, policies aimed at securing full employment were a basic commitment expected of all governments. Now, Gideon says starving the poor will ensure they jump into jobs. The words “neo-liberalism” and “paradigm shift” get horribly, misleadingly and unhelpfully over used. But my golly do they have some traction today.
September 1, 2010
Step Aside, Shakespeare
There was amazement across Britain’s print and broadcast media today, after a book was released which told the UK public absolutely nothing it did not already know.
Whilst more perceptive observers had warned that the title of Tony Blair’s memoirs already told us enough, commentators today fell over themselves to wax lyrical about what is normally described as “old news”.
The revelation that Mr Blair did not get along with his former ally turned power-rival Gordon Brown was received with wonder. Hacks across the land expressed detailed interest in a revelation they themselves had been covering on a weekly basis for a decade, and had recently been repeating after the publications of Andrew Rawnsley’s The End of the Party and Peter Mandelson’s own memoirs.
Comment has also been dedicated to the utterly surprising discovery that Mr Blair is a rather conservative political figure, who still cherishes the New Labour project and blames Labour’s 2010 loss on a departure from rightwing market-orientated policies coated with a fat layer of spin. That this last claim is obvious garbage appears to have escaped most of Britain’s razor-sharp watchdog media, busy echoing trusted platitudes into the chamber that provides their shelter.
Most amazingly, it was also revealed today that Blair does not regret undertaking an illegal, unnecessary war which led to thousands of civilian deaths, destabilised the Middle East, increased the risk of domestic terrorism, diverted resources from the failing war in Afghanistan and rightfully discredited the Labour party in the eyes of millions of voters. What was particularly astounding was that Tony Blair had certainly not said exactly the same thing – complete with crocodile tears and solemn tales of nightmares – at the Chilcot Enquiry earlier this year. An appearance which led some observers to conclude that Blair was certifiably insane and living in a world of his own delusions.
Yet the enormous media interest generated in Blair’s book of revelations also stems, no doubt, from its sparkling prose and incisive intellectual analysis. Passages which will no doubt be immortalised in literary history:
“I heard an interesting example of this once from, of all people, Nelson Mandela. Mandela – or Madiba as he is also called (his clan name) – is a fascinating study, not because he’s a saint but because he isn’t. Or rather he is, but not in the sense that he can’t be as fly as hell when the occasion demands. I bet Gandhi was the same.”
“Hadn’t we fought a great campaign? Hadn’t we impaled our enemies on our bayonet, like ripe fruit?”
But on this day of revelations – when a multimillionaire megalomaniac is rewarded for war crimes and a betrayal of the British left by receiving even more cash and attention – I leave you with an observation, and a question.
Reflecting on election night 1997, Mr Blair proclaims: “Even then, the enormity of what was about to happen didn’t really sink in.”
The Oxford English Dictionary offers two definitions of “enormity”
1. Deviation from moral or legal rectitude. In later use influenced by ENORMOUS. Extreme or monstrous wickedness.
2. A breach of law or morality; a transgression, crime; in later use, a gross & monstrous offence.
More importantly, will the German edition of Herr Blair’s A Journey be marketed under its literal translation? Namely, Eine Fahrt.
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H/t to Chris for the OED spot, and other tweeted hilarities.
August 31, 2010
The Conservative Left
John Stuart Mill once remarked:
“…the enemies of religious freedom, when hard pressed, occasionally accept this consequence, and say, with Dr. Johnson, that the persecutors of Christianity were in the right; that persecution is an ordeal through which truth ought to pass, and always passes successfully, legal penalties being, in the end, powerless against truth, though sometimes beneficially effective against mischievous errors.”
Mill thought this was nonsense. To assume that an idea or argument would triumph in civil society simply because it is true (or valuable) was complacent and false. Persecution could destroy truth; there was no guarantee that right would overcome might. The counter-measure was to guarantee free expression and the conflict of ideas, without fear of persecution, so as to provide the best chance for true – or valuable - ideas to flourish when they might otherwise be suppressed and lost.
The correlate to Mill’s suspicion is the realisation that victorious ideas – often meaning the ideas we now take for granted – will win not because they were right or the best, but because they had the most powerful backers at crucial junctures of history.
Hence, although the American Founding Fathers were clear that they were setting up a republic and explicitly not a democracy, America now presents itself as the leader of the Free World, membership of which requires express commitment to democratic political arrangements. Indeed, on a day when American troops officially pull out of Iraq, many of that conflict’s apologists will claim that the hundreds of thousands dead are a price worth paying for “democracy in the middle east”.
Somewhere and somehow between 1776 and 2010, democracy went from being a byword for anarchy and disorder to the only legitimate form of government in the world – and the rise of American power is at the heart of that tale.
For better or for worse, we now often assume that democracy must have triumphed in the course of history simply because it was right to triumph. We don’t tend to pause and consider just how slippery a concept “democracy” really is. Nor do we often reflect upon the extent to which democracy’s victory was the direct result of two totalitarian states waging a war of mass attrition 70 years ago. It’s easier not to think about complexities; nicer to assume that if things turned out this way, that was because they deserved – and all is better because they did.
Yet how one thinks about the rightness of a set of ideas will often influence how one thinks about its consequences. For example: if one believes that free-market orientated Thatcherism won the battle of ideas in the 1980s because it was the best option for the country, that perhaps makes the resulting socio-economic inequalities 30 years down the line easier to swallow. By contrast, if the British rightward shift post-1979 is perceived as having more to do with the contingencies of a disorganised and suicidal Labour Party than the absolute superiority of right-wing market ideology, then the victory of Thatcherism may seem rather less ordained, and the consequences rather more open to criticism.
Given the importance and power of ideas regarding what people find acceptable, open to criticism, or positively sacrosanct, it’s unsurprising that battles of ideas are frequently waged by powerful figures. This eye-opening New Yorker article illustrates the extent to which the billionaire oil baron Koch brothers fund and direct right-wing campaigns designed to push anti-government libertarian agendas, whilst co-ordinating covert attacks on the Obama administration. The Tea Party movement brands itself as grass roots, but its string-pullers are a tiny, plutocratic capitalist elite.
And this observation of a Tea Party leader seems entirely correct: “Ideas don’t happen on their own. Throughout history, ideas need patrons.” Certainly. For if truth and veracity are insufficient to secure victory, then ideas will indeed need patrons. And the wealthier, more connected and successfully organised those patrons, the better.
But ideas don’t just need patrons, they also need energy. Passion, commitment, fervent belief and a sense of righteous purpose. The Tea Party movement and the ever-more radical American right clearly has these in abundance – even if it presently lacks control, direction or sanity. But even here in the UK, political energy and dynamism has been – for as long as I’ve been politically aware, at least – the property of the political right (in which I include the rightward drift of New Labour and its liberalising, pro-market reforms and acceptance of the Thatcherite settlement).
The left, when not campaigning (usually with futility) on single issues like the Iraq War or climate change, expends most of its energy fighting a rearguard defence against attacks on the welfare state and the remaining non-marketised areas of society. This rearguard defence is made more difficult by the evident fact that the modern left – following the collapse of even the pretence of a viable socialist alternative post-1989 – has no co-ordinated vision of what to put in place of the dominant right wing advance. As usual, the late, great Tony Judt put it best:
“The real problem facing Europe’s Socialists (I use the term purely for its descriptive convenience, since it is now shorn of any ideological charge) is not their policy preferences, taken singly. Job creation, a more ‘social’ Europe, public infrastructural investment, educations reforms, and the like are laudable and uncontroversial. But nothing binds these policies or proposals together into a common political or moral narrative. The Left has no sense of what its own political success, if achieved, would mean; it has no articulated vision of a good, or even of a better, society. In the absence of such a vision, to be on the left is simply to be in a state of permanent protest. And since the thing most protested against is the damage wrought by rapid change, to be on the left is to be a conservative.”
July 31, 2010
Meet The Markets
We hear a lot about The Markets. Nick Robinson’s Five Day’s That Changed Britain recently invoked these spectral figures. Apparently they hovered over Greece in early May, threatening to turn on “rudderless Britain” if a coalition deal wasn’t quickly secured. More widely, a key part of the Tory cuts narrative has is that immediate and severe fiscal retrenchment is necessary or The Markets will punish us.
Given the frequency of such rhetoric you’d be forgiven for forgetting that “The Markets” refers to the uncoordinated collective actions of many thousands of unconnected individuals, working within enormous and extremely complicated financial sectors across the globe. Uncoordinated actions, moreover, which are buffeted about by millions of constantly-changing factors, which themselves have different meanings and imperatives for different agents in different situations.
On the contrary you might understandably come to think of “The Markets” as, in effect, people. As conscious, reflective, decision-making agents, taking stock of situations and acting rationally to pursue specifically chosen ends and means. (Note: some economists argue that markets act “rationally” in the sense of efficiently processing information and moving in a calibrated direction accordingly. This may or may not be completely true, but either way it’s different to what I’m getting at, which is the idea of conscious, reflective, deliberating agents making decisions to act in certain ways).
Indeed what we appear to have ended up with is a popular conception – amongst media pundits, politicians and voters – of markets as persons. This interests me, for these reasons.
Firstly, the idea of “fictional persons” has been explored at length by historian and political theorist Quentin Skinner. Skinner claims that Thomas Hobbes originally conceived of the State as a “person by fiction” 350 years ago, a conception that deeply influences how we think today. The “fictional person” of a State stands distinct from the specific agents of government. It takes on a personhood of its own, and is able to act and bring about events in ways that are highly analogous to the actions of a real (physical, human) person. Think, for example, of when we say “the state imprisoned him for 47 years”, or “the state’s defences were mobilised to repulse attackers”.
As a consequence we operate with an extremely useful fiction (that perhaps even ceases to be wholly fictional when enough people believe in it). An entity which deliberates, chooses and acts – but exists over-and-above its constituent parts. Something that pre-dates and outlives governmental administrations; that is more than the mere sum of politicians, the judiciary, the army and police.
Indeed it is hard to imagine the modern world without such useful fictions. Permanent presences across the globe, fighting wars, meeting at the UN, signing trade agreements and all the rest. Fictions can be extremely useful. If believed in by enough people, they can do crucial work in ordering societies and making them function.
Secondly, the process of personation lends The Markets an air not just of consciousness, but also of conscientiousness. That The Markets will respond favourably to the right incentives, the right actions – or, if you like, the right offerings. By making The Markets into (fictional) persons, a space is opened up in which to treat them as, in effect, capricious gods. The ancient Greeks and Romans followed systems of polytheism within which deities had (eerily human) character traits, and especially flaws. This allowed the ancients to construct world-views within which it made sense to try and appease certain deities. By pleasing them or attempting to pander to their prejudices – for example, by making the right sacrifices. Anybody who reads the Old Testament will know that the Judeo-Christian tradition did not leave this view of sacrifice behind. Apparently, we carry it with us still.
Which raises the question: by conceiving of The Markets as fictional persons are we creating mythical entities which we seek to appease by dramatic fiscal austerity? Are we telling ourselves a collective fairy story that although the gods that decide our economic fates are capricious, they can nevertheless be bargained with?
Thirdly, we must ask the Foucauldian question: if the above musings have any truth to them, who is this process of fictionalised personation benefiting? Which power-interests are being served?
Let’s hypothesise. Imagine you’re a right-wing administration determined to slash the state for ideological purposes, or a right-wing media outlet disposed to promote said state-slashing. How useful would the notion of such deified but capricious entities be – especially if such entities could allegedly be placated only by the kind of fiscal austerity you already favour? Thought so.
December 15, 2009
Simon Cowell and the Difficulties of Democracy
Simon Cowell wants to do an X-Factor style politics show. Apparently he’d like to: “create a ‘bear pit’ atmosphere, with a live studio audience and viewers voting via telephone.”
Reactions to this look deceptively like they might fall simply into two types. Those who welcome the move and hail it as an extension of democracy by allowing “the people” to directly influence politicians,versus those who recoil at the prospect of skitish demagogues desperately restoring capital punishment and castrating pedophiles. Democrats versus anti-democrats, one might be tempted to say.
But it ain’t that simple. Let’s take a whistle-stop tour of intellectual history, to begin to see just how dark and messy actual democratic theory in the real world is, in stark contrast to the fluffy ideals I recently laid-out.
Let’s start with Thomas Hobbes in the mid-17th Century. Hobbes sought to justify unqualified absolutism, and wished to show that rational, self-interested agents would choose to put themselves under an absolute “Sovereign”. To this end Hobbes conducted a thought experiment in which he argued free agents seeking to escape the “nasty, brutish and short” life of the state of nature would mutually agree to put themselves into civil society by erecting an all-powerful, unchecked Sovereign. In Hobbes’ ideal thought experiment, free agents put themselves, directly and unanimously into civil society. Absolute Sovereigns may be the logically necessary under-pinning of civil society, but in idealised circumstances they were instantiated via pure, immediate democracy (in reality they conquered you, and you bloody well lived with it).
After Hobbes, John Locke softened things by providing that “tyrannical” sovereigns could be legitimately resisted. Sovereign right returned to the people who initially delegated legitimate power to rulers in the first place. In the good times the people “tacitly consented” to be ruled by whoever they found themselves under – with the condition that rebellion was permitted if rulers became tyrants.
In the mid-18th Century, Jean Jaques Rousseau penned his (in)famous Du Contrat Social in which he claimed a (city-)state was legitimate only if all its free citizens could assemble together each year to reveal the “General Will”, and agree to delegate the running of mundane administrative government to trusted officials, who themselves were merely servants (and explicitly not representatives).
Aside from the successive move away from Hobbesian absolutism, it’s worth noting that these theorists didn’t propose for “the people” to be “represented” by intermediaries making decisions on their behalf. Thoughts about “sovereign peoples” being represented by delegates whose task was to carry-forth the will of the people came later. And if we’re going to pick a date, it may as well be 1789.
The French Revolution threw up the need for a “people” to exercise democratic power in quite a spectacular way – but in a nation of over 25 million, Rousseau’s ideal of “the people together assembled” legislating directly was obviously a fantasy. Thus emerged justifications for the legitimacy of elected representatives, who would carry forth the people’s will and govern in their interests. The influential pamphlet What is the Third Estate? by Josef Sieyes is the classic text, in case you’re interested.
The ideal and idea of representative democracy spread throughout 19th Century Europe – but took on strange new forms. In a world of antagonistic class conflicts amidst rapid industrialisation, the series of reform bills extending the franchise in, say, Britain, were met with horror by some sections of the ruling class, but embraced by reformists like Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill. Those in the utilitarian tradition, espousing “the greatest happiness for the greatest number” as the fundamental moral principle for ordering society, (arguably) joined their thinking up with Rousseau’s notions of the “general will”. They came to see representative democracy as a system for securing the best outcomes for the mass of a people, as well as providing a system of government which tended to produce leaders sensitive to the needs and interests of those electing them. Conservatives and Marxists disagreed, of course – but in the 19th Century, history went against them.
Mass industrialised societies in Western Europe steadily embraced the notion that increasing numbers of ordinary citizens ought to have a say in who ruled them, and by 1918 even some British women were given the franchise (so you may want to have a think about whether Britain has really been a “democracy” for even a hundred years yet…)
Of course, by the early 20th Century things looked decidedly more desperate for democracy. Witnessing the post-WWI collapse of the German-speaking lands, thinkers like Max Weber noted the increasing power of economic actors, the vast anti-democratic significance of mass bureaucracy, and the importance of leaders carried to power not simply off the back of votes but from their own “charismatic” authority over supporters. Darker voices succeeded him: Carl Schmitt (who we met last week), saw representative parliamentary democracy as in free-fall; dragged-down by the failures of liberalism, threatened by the anti-democratic surges from fascist Italy and Bolshevist Russia. From 1929-45, representative (liberal) democracy – and the capitalism it went hand-in-hand with – looked decidedly like it was going to kick the bucket.
But it didn’t. Representative liberal democracy – with a lot of help from Uncle Joe in the East, and Mr Keynes in Britain – beat Hitler and Mussolini on the battlefields and managed to resuscitate what looked like an economic corpse. It then settled down for a nice, long cold war – until in 1989 it suddenly found itself strangely alone and triumphant.
However, way back when capitalist representative democracy was still locked in a death-fight with fascism – and for a couple of years Bolshevism too – a certain Joseph Schumpeter wrote an interesting little book called Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, published in 1942. This book has some intriguing consequences regarding Mr Cowell’s hiatus from the destruction of western cultured civilisation and his foray into politics.
Schumpeter thought democracy itself could have no intrinsic value: it is simply a method of arriving at leaders and governments. Yet he also thought that the “Classical Doctrine of Democracy” – that there is a “general will” of “the people” that representatives are elected to uphold and pursue – was a myth. Instead, Schumpeter looked at the world and saw power-elites who vied for people’s votes whilst simultaneously seeking to manipulate the (ill-informed, ignorant and complacent) opinions of ordinary citizens in much the same way advertisers manipulate consumer preferences. Opinions could be manufactured. What Schumpeter saw was not an enlightened citizenry, rationally selecting representatives who would act in voters’ interests to serve the “will of the people”, but narrow selections of leaders who vie for popular votes every few years, which they simultaneously attempt to manipulate.
To gleefully annoy many contemporary political theorists, post-Schumpeterian democratic theory is essentially a fight between those who think Schumpeter broadly got it right, and those who think he mostly got it wrong, with a load of autistic economists thrown into the mix.
Schumpeter believed that implicit in democratic society is an agreement to a “political division of labour.” Voters agree to only engage in direct political action at fixed points – i.e. elections – and for the most part they let politicians get on with things, on the understanding they will be voted from office if they fail to meet expectations. Voters may criticise, bemoan and complain, of course – but actual political interference is tacitly understood to be off-limits:
“All that matters here is that successful democratic practice in great and complicated societies has invariably been hostile to political back-seat driving – to the point of resorting to secret diplomacy and lying about intentions and commitments – and that it takes a lot of self-control on the part of the citizen to refrain from it.”
Which yields a rather interesting conclusion. If you take a Schumpeterian view of democracy, and endorse his idea that voters and politicians agree to a division of labour in properly-functioning democracy, then what Simon Cowell is proposing could be read as decidedly undemocratic. By encouraging inter-election voter pressure to be brought upon politicians, Cowell is arguably subverting the democratic status quo of labour division within the political-governmental sphere.*
Of course – and to anticipate a point-missing reply – this only follows on a certain conception of democracy, one that is cynical about democratic mechanisms and the collective wisdoms and myths surrounding them. But the important point is precisely whose democracy is it anyway?
The above has tried to sketch that the (intellectual) history of representative democracy is long and complicated. What democracy in its representative form constitutes in the here and now is open to potentially dark interpretations.
So the next time some dinner-party bore** waves her copy of the Daily Mail at you and claims that Simon Cowell is striking a blow for popular democracy against ZaNuLiebor, don’t be too quick to agree. It’s all much messier than that sort of platitude can possibly allow for.
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* Yes, oh eagle-eyed observer: the same argument might be made regarding the ordinary media. Perhaps that is an argument for why Schumpeter’s conception fails. But I rather think it’s more complicated than that…
** I don’t actually go to dinner parties. I wish I did. In reality I mostly eat Chinese food in my underwear. Mostly alone. But this is the sort of rounding-off remark Ben Goldacre makes, and I’d like to pretend I’m more like him.
November 22, 2009
Some Ways to Think About Democracy
Over at Stumbling and Mumbling, Chris Dillow has recently been expressing various degrees of scepticism about the virtues and values of democracy. For example yesterday he wrote that:
“Of course, in a democracy irrational and illiberal preferences have as much weight as rational ones. Which, for some of us, is another argument against democracy.”
Now, I’m not sure to what extent Chris is being tongue in cheek in his expressed dissatisfactions with democracy. But I get the feeling that in these sorts of short closing remarks an awful lot of complicated stuff about what democracy is and why it might have value gets neglected. And that seems to me not only an intellectual shame, but slightly troubling. So this is primarily for you, Chris. But it’s also for everyone else who uses this very strange word “democracy”, to make many big points about many difficult things – whether you realise you’re making such points or not.
Let’s begin by recalling with John Dunn - as expressed in his excellent little book Setting the People Free - that democracy typically refers to at least two things. Firstly it’s a system of government, which has a decision-making procedure embedded within it. (Notice straight away that we’re into complications: what kind of system of government? America is rather different to the UK in institutional respects, after all. And how are “democratic” decisions made? Typically: by representative agents, selected by an enfranchised group that usually covers the majority of the adult population of a given territory. But what about referenda?).
Secondly, “democracy” also refers to a value. Democracy is generally treated – in political sloganeering, impassioned discourse and expansionist American foreign policy - as the only legitimate form of government in the world. But more than that, people frequently want to say that “democracy” has value; that a system, or procedure, or consequence which is “democratic” is better than one which is ”undemocratic” (a word typically employed, it’s worth noting, as a slur).
So, when we chuck around the term “democracy”, we’re chucking around references to at least two broad categories of things, which are themselves immensely complicated. Oh, and there’s also a little historical puzzle to consider too: apart from a brief, intermittent 100 year experiment in Ancient Athens from (very roughly) 440-322 BC, for all of history until 1789 AD (the year of the French Revolution), almost nobody thought democracy was a good idea. Indeed, even the authors of that great founding text of modern American Government - The Federalist Papers – were explicit in that work that they were certainly not founding a “democracy”, but a “republic” (from which to construct an “American empire”). Yet nowadays “democracy” is the only legitimate dog in town. A strange story indeed, you might think. But that’s a tale for another day.
Anyway, another man who thought democracy meant at least two things (and quite possibly more) was my personal intellectual hero, Alexis de Tocqueville. After travelling to America in the early 19th Century on a compare and contrast mission to discover if American democracy could ever be emulated in post-Revolution, post-Napoleon, total-mess-of-a-country France, Tocqueville wrote the splendidly enormous book Democracy in America. In that he noticed that democracy seemed to be not just a form of government – Americans voting in their presidential elections, for their state representatives, attending their local town hall meetings etc - but also about a social condition of society. American democracy was all about “equality of conditions”; that in the USA there was no “aristocratic” class, deemed to be intrinsically superior to the masses and bestowed with legal privilege accordingly. Rather, everyone was equal in legal – and crucially, social* – status. Democracy was intimately bound up with notions of equality and American people themselves were thoroughly conditioned by this belief in pervasive egalitarianism (even if the egalitarian picture got much messier the deeper one delved).
It’s worth mentioning Tocqueville not just to highlight that “democracy” may be a much trickier concept than typically assumed, but because his reflections serve as an entry point for my first comment upon why “democracy” might be a desirable thing to have. Tocqueville – you must understand – didn’t particularly like democracy. He thought it produced mediocre men who lived in mediocre times, (the grand aristocratical endeavours of the ancient world, for example, were finished – and that was to be lamented). Having said that, Tocqueville could see that democracy brought some considerably and important benefits, albeit strangely paradoxical ones.
There was no doubt for Tocqueville that democracy returned politicians of poor quality, who tended to enact laws of likewise poor substance. Looked at in isolation, this appeared a mark against the democratic system. But Tocqueville observed that the great upshot of democratic mediocrity was that it likewise didn’t produce terrible politicians who enacted terrible laws (or if it did, such politicians were quickly kicked out, and the laws quickly repealed). Under democracy, there would be no Napoleons conquering their neighbours in great flourishing sweeps of military grandeur - but likewise, there would be no catastrophic retreat from Moscow, and humiliating defeat of the state, with thousands of dead soldiers and innocents strewn across a continent.
For Tocqueville, this was the great paradox of democracy: a crappy system returning crappy politicians making crappy laws, which somehow managed to be the best system because when summed together all that crappiness worked. It worked, especially, to the best advantages of all the ordinary people, living under the equality of conditions. Whilst creating many mediocre men and perhaps no great ones, democracy ensured the former weren’t sacrificed in their thousands to the mad-cap schemes of the unrestrained latter.
In this sense Tocqueville’s observation (which is much more detailed and nuanced in his text than I’ve been able to render it here) is not a million miles away from Winston Churchill’s remark that:
“It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others that have been tried”
Churchill’s observation should ring especially true in the early 21st Century, as we look back not just upon the feudal and aristocratic systems that preceded modern democracy, but upon the very fresh graves of Nazism, Stalinism and Maoism of the last century. So, substantive ethical point to think about number one: democracy (whatever that may actually mean), appears to be much better at not ruining the lives of the people who have to live under it than any other form of social-political organisation yet tried.
If you’re having thoughts about “enlightened dictators” who could avoid the worst excesses of tyranny and deliver us from the incompetence of democracy, well here’s another substantive point: your thoughts pertain to the fantasy of an unspecificed system never known, tested or tried. Democracy, on the other hand, has shown that whilst it can produce Richard Nixons and George Bushes, it doesn’t seem to produce Joseph Stalins. And that really does matter, as Tocqueville was able to observe even before the horrors of the 20th Century gave us pause for thought.
Switching focus, here’s some other things to consider. Democracy – if it is to be such – only really works when certain things are granted to the democratic population. I’m here thinking of certain “rights” which look like a pretty necessary prerequisites of genuine democratic society (in terms of government and social arrangements, again conveniently ignoring the complications). For example, it seems fairly obvious that for a “democracy” to exist, we need free and fair elections. This means that amongst other things, the government cannot control all the media in a given nation state, or prevent the population from associating and organising politically. Free and fair elections require freedom of the press, and freedom of association. These freedoms – and rights of the citizen body to exercise them – are built into the framework of functioning democracies. Of course, there will always be imperfections, failures, limitations and complications. No system is perfect. But if you value freedom of speech, press and association, then you really ought to value democracy – or at least think about the fact that no other system known or tried by humanity has ever managed to deliver these things.
So far, however, our thoughts have all been “instrumental”: about how democracy (whatever it might be) is valuable because it leads to other things we value being brought about. But is it possible that democracy is just good in itself, and not because of the consequences it creates or promotes?
It looks likely that the answer is yes. For consider, if a democracy is to be such, it seems like something pretty fundamental is going to have to obtain with regards to the citizen class of that democracy: they must all have equal rights to participate in the political process. This seems to be just a fact about democracy. If you exclude a portion of the population from the right to participate, on some arbitrary grounds (e.g. race, sex, religion), then that doesn’t look like a democratic government or society, even if some sections of the population are considered (full) citizens and allowed to participate, e.g. by voting or standing for election. (So yes, I don’t think Britain was properly a democracy until women were granted the suffrage, and yes, the example of Ancient Athens with it’s male-only suffrage and slave class raises very interesting questions).
Of course, some limits on who can participate will have to be imposed – under 18s, say, or maybe criminals. But the exclusions are the exceptions, and made with stated justifications; the default is that every citizen has equal right to participation, in lieu of countervailing considerations. And that to me looks like an intrinsically good thing about democracy. That it is ethically desirable for a state to extent equal rights to all citizen members, simply on the basis of their being citizens.
If equality doesn’t rock your boat, that’s not so big a problem. Think about this: democracies typically extend equal rights to everyone, and enshrine them in law. This means that everybody under democracy is treated equally before the law (at least in theory, though sadly often not in practice). The result is that democracy operates upon the principle that citizens have intrinsic equal worth vis-a-vis each other, and also vis-a-vis the institutions of the state, at least as far as the application of laws is concerned. Because of equality before the law, under democracy the state must consider all citizens as equal when exerting its power and influence over them or adjudicating between them, meaning that all citizens are deemed to have equal intrinsic worth.
If you’re an egalitarian, the equality bit is an extra bonus. But even if you’re not, you may think that a system of government that enshrines the intrinsic worth of all individuals, based simply on their being born a human citizen (and not, say, because of their race or religion) has a great intrinsic value. And this point still stands even if we enumerate all the ways in which existing democracies often fail to enshrine or uphold the intrinsic (equal) worth of all citizens: democracy does a damn better job on this score than any other system of governmental-social arrangement every witnessed or tried. And again, that counts for a lot.
Don’t get me wrong, I know I’ve brushed aside a whole heap of contradictions and difficulties. I’m not trying to say that democracy is perfect (we all know it isn’t!), or that everything I’ve said is uncontroversial or can’t be refined or challenged (almost all of it is and can). What I’ve tried to do is sketch some basic reasons why democracy is complicated, and why some of its potential values need to be considered carefully.
Want more? Well you could do a lot worse than buy the second edition of Adam Swift’s excellent little book Political Philosophy, A Beginners Guide for Students and Politicians. (You must buy the second edition, as the democracy chapter is absent from the first).
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* Ok, Ok, it’ a bit more complicated than that. But this is just an intro sketch.
November 3, 2009
An Open Letter to the Conservative Leadership
Dear Conservative Party Leadership,
I spend a lot of time attacking you and your party. But I’m prepared to cut a deal. If you do just one thing for me, I promise I will stop pointing at your insane economic policies, your amazing broken promise on a Lisbon referendum (the first government to break a key promise before being elected?), your far-right allies in Europe, your netroots maniacs, and your complete lack of policies regarding basically everything apart from destroying the economy.
Sounds good? OK, what I want you to do for me is this: abandon wholesale New Labour’s stupid, short-sighted, naive, utterly idiotic, meddling, creativity-destroying philistinism towards Britain’s universities.
I’m thinking not just of the (leaked) proposals to rate university courses on the same model as food packaging here, though it is my inspiration for writing to you. I’m actually thinking much more widely. About, for example, the mind-blowing stupidity of aspects of the Research Assesment Exercise, which virtually dictates how institutions receive funding (although now Mr Mandelson is complaining that institutions are too research-driven and not offering a “consumer-driven choice” to undergraduate students!) Of New Labour’s persistant attempts to meddle with top universities, claiming this is justified because they don’t accept enough state-sector students due to some implied bias in favour of posh kids, when in fact anyone who has done access work (e.g. yours truly) knows that the biggest problem is that state schools as a general rule are simply not as good as fee-paying ones and are far less likely to encourage students to aim for the top, thus meaning that, by age 18, applicants from the independent sector outnumber, and simply look better (even if they are in truth not), than their state-educated competitors. In general, I’m thinking of New Labour’s obsession with targets, control and denying autonomy and independence to anything within its grasp.
In general, I’m thinking of New Labour’s obsession with targets, control and denying autonomy and independence to anything within its grasp.
Of course, I’m biased. After attending a less-than-great state school (though admittedly, there are far worse around, and mine benefited enormously from New Labour cash), I beat the odds and made it to Oxford. There I had the unbelievable privilege of an intense course of study, where I was permitted to abandon “useful” subjects like economics and political science, and instead focus on philosophy and political thought. I also received another immense privilege, for which I am eternally grateful: being tutored by individuals who were likewise able to pursue their own interests and ideas without their purse-strings being (overtly) yanked by the state, thus pulling them into line and forcing them to research something “useful”. Indeed, after a post-graduation spell in the so-called “real world” (I prefer “world of integrity-destroying boredom”), I am back studying something entirely “useless” in the eyes of that fabled business sector which has done so well of the past 18 months. But I can presently do so without myself or my tutors being told that this must cease because it doesn’t have “economic benefits”.
But don’t just take my biased word for it. Consider for a start that most of my undergraduate peers – thanks to the education we received – have gone on to do all sorts of “useful” jobs for banks, lawyers, management consultants, political parties and other such parasitical greed-factories wealth creators.
Think also of something else. If I continue to post-doctoral level, I will myself teach the future cogs in the parasitical machines innovators and entrepreneurs to think independently and for themselves. Of course, only a platinum fool would be unable to see that this really matters. Because it is impossible – contra fashionable rhetoric – to teach “the skills of the future”. Mostly because nobody knows – by definition – what the skills of the future are yet. The best we can do is teach people to think for themselves with an ability to adapt to the new and the changing. People who can do that will be able to acquire the skills of the future, when we find out what they are. That’s why our universities have for decades turned-out vast numbers of articulate, intelligent, highly adaptable and self-reliant individuals able to acquire the requisite skills of the moment. That they read classics, English literature, philosophy, maths, French, engineering, biology or whatever at university is irrelevant. It was the skills that the process of learning equiped them with that mattered.
Only a platinum fool could fail to understand that universities cannot be graded on a check-box system, with priority given only to those studies that have “economic value”. All study has economic value, somewhere down the line – it just might take rather a while for it all to become apparent. And anyway, it’s abundantly clear that many of our institutions at present already contribute vast sums to the national economy. Take Cambridge University, which is estimated to contribute £50billion per annum and employ 110,000 people already. Surely only an ignoramus of monolithic proportions would think it wise to increasingly meddle with this, believing that check-box inspection and hoop-jumping for cash could do anything but stifle and constrain.
But then, even if study didn’t render economic benefits – had no instrumental value whatsoever – would that be such a bad thing? Surely only a philistine of gargantuan scale would claim that it was therefore valueless, and should be cut-down to privilege the “economically valuable” pursuits?
I confess, dear Tory leadership, that I do indeed hold Peter Mandelson to be such a platinum fool, monolithic ignoramus and gargantuan philistine. Indeed, I could go on and on and on about how wrong-headed the present administration is. But Mary Beard, Simon Blackburn and David Mitchell have made many good points already.
Instead I will simply say this. David Cameron has declared his love of decentralisation (though some have found it more complex than he supposes). Michael Gove announced that he wants more “traditional” and “proper” subjects on the school curriculum. Now, whatever the deficiencies of these two men and their rhetoric may be, I implore you to put your Tory money where your mouth is: leave the universities be, ease the grip on the purse strings, reverse New Labour’s attacks, restore academic freedoms and sit back and watch as the economy, the country, students, academics and – ultimately – the government all benefit.
Do that, and I promise I will spend the rest of my blogging days telling people about how amazing I think Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments is (because it is, and once you’ve read it you will sympathise with me*), and recommending people simply ignore the nasty party and listen to Philosophy Bites all day instead.
Your Sincerely,
Paul Sagar
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*That’s a little joke for philosophers there. Mandy won’t get it – will you, Dave?
October 27, 2009
La plus ça change
When debating politics, it often feels like arguments go round in circles. The same points seem to get made over and again by all sides. The specific issues at hand may change, but the underlying positions informing responses can seem not to.
And I’m not just talking about tiresome, stuck-record individuals. If we go back over 250 years – to the early-mid 18th Century, during the great debates about the emergence of commerce, the benefits (or vices) of luxury, and the great enquiries into the nature and causes of the wealth of nations – we find patterns of argument that should look astonishingly familiar to contemporary readers.
Take the following by Jean-Francois Melon, from his enormously influential A Political Essay Upon Commerce (which according to Istvan Hont, dominated the debate on the emergence of nascent capitalism for 15 years after it was published in 1734):
“The excessive Price paid for some trifling Provisions, which the Luxurious Man displayeth with Profusion, at an Entertainment, the Merit whereof, he would have to consist in the Expensiveness of it, is an Instance of the highest, and most ridiculous Kind of Luxury, and yet, why should this extravagant Expence be exclaimed against? The Money thus earned, would, if it lay in the Chest of the Luxurious Man, remain Dead to the Society. The Gardiner receiveth it, and hath deserved it, as a Recompence for his Labour, which is thereby excited again. His Children, almost naked, are thereby clothed; they eat Bread in Plenty, enjoy better Health, and labour with a cheerful Expectation. The same Money given to Beggars, would only serve to feed their Idleness and Debaucheries.”
The attitude expressed is not at all dissimilar to the modern defence (usually from the political right) that the rich can spend their money on whatever the hell they like, even if that consumption is stupid and superfluous. It’s their money, after all. Furthermore, the added justification which follows – that money spent leads to employment, production, growth and ultimately better living for those lower down the social order – is not a million miles away from the “trickle-down effect” argument beloved of neo-liberal politicians (and some economists) in the 1980s especially. The final remark – that there’s no point giving money to the poor, they must work for their subsistence – should hardly be unfamiliar to modern readers.
But Melon’s remarks are nothing compared to this tirade from everybody’s favourite civic republican multiple-child-abandoner, Jean-Jacques Rousseau:
“As soon as the use of gold was known to men, they all strove to pile up a great quantity of it. Naturally, success had to correspond to the various degrees of industriousness and avidity of the competitors – in other words, they had to be deeply unequal. This first inequality, combined with avarice and with the talents which had produced it, must have increased even more through its own strength; for one of the vices of existing societies is that the difficulty to acquire anything always increases according to needs, and that the surplus the wealthy have is itself what enables them to deprive the poor of the bare necessities. It is an axiom in business as well as in physics that one makes nothing with nothing. Money is the true seed of money, and the first crown is infinitely harder to earn than the second million. Besides, thefts are punished only when necessity makes them forgivable; they cost honour and life to the poor man, and bring glory and fortune to the wealthy man. A destitute man who takes a crown from a harsh man sated with gold in order to have bread is a thief led to the gallows, whereas honoured citizens peacefully quench their thirst with the blood of the craftsman and the farmer. And the monopolies of the trader and the embezzlements of the taxgatherer bear the names of useful talents and ensure those exercising them that they have the favour of the Prince and the esteem of the public. That is how the wealth of the whole nation makes the opulence of a few individuals at the expense of the public, and how the treasures of millionaires increase the destitution of the citizenry. For in that forced, monstrous inequality, it follows that the sensuousness of the wealthy devours in delights the substance of the people, and blows their way only a dry, stale, brown bread at the cost of sweat and servitude.”
- Luxury, Commerce and the Arts, 1754
Rousseau packs so much into this passage it’s hard to know where to start. But I spot:
- Complaints that money begets money, and inequality harms the already worst-off the most, which is very similar to a now standard “left wing” complaint against the lack of equality of opportunity in present-day British capitalist society;
- Multiple claims that it is the very wealth of the rich which makes the poor, poor. And not just because poverty is a relative concept – elsewhere in the essay Rousseau notes that “the words poor and rich are relative, there are poor people only because there are rich people, and in more than one sense” – but because the rich “deprive the poor of the bare necessities”. Again, this should not be a new or novel concept to the modern reader;
- Reflections upon the frequency with which (what we would call) “white collar crime” is severely punished, versus the leniency offered to that of the “blue collar” variety, something I’ve reflected upon before;
- Praise being heaped upon the professions of the well-off, whilst the important tasks undertaken by the poor are marginalised and under-valued despite their being essential. Members of the financial services industry calling themselves “the wealth creators” and justifying grotesque salaries and bonuses whilst nurses and bin-men go on unsung and largely unnoticed, anyone?
- That inequality is “monstrous”. Indeed it appears for Rousseau to be the inevitable and despicable outcome of free commerce and wealth-accumulation (which we would probably now call “capitalism”) and leads to the misery and suffering of the poor, who end up with only “stale, brown bread” as the rich devour with delight their substance. However, given what Rousseau says about inequality in On The Social Contract we can also extrapolate another thought (not expressed directly in this early essay, but definitely in the later 1763 work): that inequality is bad because it leads to mistrust, factionalism and the break-down of the civic community. In sum, if there is inequality everyone suffers, not just the poor. Wilkinson and Pickett use empirical data about health, happiness and life-expectancy in The Spirit Level to argue that inequality is bad for everyone in modern society. Rousseau favoured appeals to the political and civic nature of the good human life. Different arguments, to be sure. But inequality is derided in both for its unhealthy effects upon human beings.
The only apparent divergence between Rousseau’s polemic and standard modern “left wing” complaints against (what we now call) capitalism is his denigration of tax collectors. Most modern leftists see tax and its collection as a positive force. But then, we must recall that Rousseau almost certainly has mid-18th Century France in his sights here, where huge chunks of the nobility (and clergy) simply didn’t pay any tax due to their estate privileges. So Rousseau’s hostility on that front shouldn’t bother us too much or be at all surprising.
Personally, I find the above passages pretty striking. It looks as though – in some respects and broadly speaking – we’re having pretty similar fights, and making roughly the same points, as were being fought and made when nascent capitalism first garnered popular and intellectual attention in the early 18th Century.
Whether you find that simply interesting, or perhaps a little depressing, is an indication of your outlook on life and politics, I suppose.
October 9, 2009
Hedge Funds and Aquinas
Many people will have missed this, but the Church of England recently declared that hedge funds are “OK”.
This may come as a surprise. As the FT notes:
“At the height of the financial crisis last September, [Archbishop] Dr Williams said it was right to ban short selling, while [Archbishop] Dr Sentamu called traders who cashed in on falling prices “bank robbers and asset strippers.”
Yet, apparently, hedge funds are not part of the financial axis of evil which represents greed and all that is wrong with modern capitalism. Obviously, this has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that the Church of England had, er, £13 million invested in a leading hedge fund at the end of 2008, was lambasted by financiers for its hypocritical pronunciations earlier this year, and is currently reeling from seeing the value of its investment fall from £5.7bn in 2007 to £4.4bn in 2008.
But aside from such cynicism, it is tragic indeed to see the leaders of our national church act and speak in such grave ignorance of the wise words of one St Thomas Aquinas. Aquinas being the great theologian who bridged the gap between Aristotle and Christianity, and who continues to inform vast swathes of the theology that archbishops Williams and Sentamu took their doctorates in.
For it is St Thomas himself who tells us that:
“To accept usury for the loan of money is in itself unjust; because this is selling what does not exist, and must obviously give rise to inequality, which is contrary to justice…If a man were to sell separately both the wine and the use of the wine, he would be selling the same thing twice over; that is he would be selling what does not exist: and he would clearly be sinning against justice.” Summa Theologica (Qu 78, Art. 1, concl.)
And what’s a hedge fund? Well, basically, it’s an investment made in order to gain interest, which the hedge-fund manager gets paid to maximise in order for investment returns to accrue to the investor. In other words, a hedge fund is a prime example of usury, and the profiteering of usury by the already wealthy or well-endowed. This gives rise to more inequality than we began with, and as St Thomas – or perhaps more accurately, “The Philosopher” – tells us, this is contrary to justice!
£1 billion worse off or not, it is tragic – tragic I tell you – to see our esteemed Church elders so in ignorance of the teachings of the great Aquinas, licensing these wicked hedge funds that are contrary to justice itself. Honestly, what’s the world coming to, eh?
Hell in a hand cart. Mark my words.
[H/t to Nick at the TJN blog for this]
