The Rapacity of the Welfare State

Wednesday

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One of the most striking features of most pre-modern, pre-industrialized societies was the rapacity of the ruling class. Anyone with their hands upon the levers of power would manipulate whatever institutional apparatus was available in order to enrich themselves at the expense of those less unfortunate — a practice that reached such obscene extremes that the vast mass of the populace was impoverished while a privileged few enjoyed unimaginable luxury. Since that time, modern industrialization has raised all boats, flooding many societies with unprecedented consumer goods and therefore giving the impression that there has been a leveling of the human condition. Unfortunately, it has been only a relative leveling, and the agents of rapacity have been exchanged. What has changed is that rapacity has been displaced from splendid individuals onto the nation-state.

The basic principle at stake is that those with enough should be satisfied with enough, and therefore render to the government anything beyond what is enough in order that this should be re-distributed to those who are judged not to have enough. The rhetoric of “needs” is common in this context, and we often encounter formulations like, “needs being met,” though this ought to give pause to anyone who notices that one of the basic confusions of consumer societies is that between wants and needs. Whereas rights are counterbalanced by duties, there is no political concept to counterbalance that of needs, except perhaps superfluity. Needs become associated with a minimal condition of bare survival that no one has the moral right to question, whereas the countervailing conception of superfluity is associated with luxury and conspicuous consumption.

Again, in contradistinction to pre-modern, pre-industrialized society, we have it good. Sufficiency under the agricultural paradigm was subsistence farming, and this often meant the barest of bare survival. Given that rudimentary baseline, anything over and above bare subsistence can be seen as superfluous. But we all know that in a social climate of rising wealth, allowing too great a gap to open up between haves and have nots can be disastrous, possibly even leading to catastrophic state failure, also known as revolution. Thus the have nots must be raised above mere subsistence, but the level of increase in standards of living will always be relative to the socio-political context. Being poor in Sweden implies a different standard of living than being poor in Gabon.

Notwithstanding the fact that “sufficiency” in this context is a term of art, the welfare state will take anything that it judges to surpass mere sufficiency, will count itself righteous for doing so, and will judge as deviant anyone who resists the expropriation of their property. Expropriation, even for the highest and noblest of motives, is still expropriation. Moreover, it remains expropriation even when expropriated according to the most meticulous machinations of due process. As noted above, anyone with their hands upon the levers of power will manipulate whatever institutional apparatus is available in order to enrich themselves at the expense of those less unfortunate — though now rather than anyone it is anything, and in particular it is the nation-state in the form of the welfare state.

The contemporary welfare state is the result of a pragmatic political compromise intended to forestall the spread of communism in Western Europe. In this it was successful. The German Historical School of economists, in other respects not particularly well respected, was instrumental in this compromise. From the perspective of later communists, this compromise constituted the capitalists “buying off” their workers (cf. the above referenced flood of consumer goods). From the perspective of the privileged, it was a remarkable act of enlightened self-interest scarcely equaled in history. Look to the reluctance of dictators today unwilling to relinquish power even as their fellows are being removed one after another, and it is easy to see the extent to which the privileged and powerful will go to retain their privilege and power.

The logic behind the rapacity of the welfare state, like the logic of rapacity of the kings, emperors, popes, and cardinals that preceded the nation-state in privilege, and like the logic of dictators ruling today, reveals its relentless, implacable extension to other areas of life — ultimately, to all areas of life — in the current healthcare debate in the US. I have written several times about the individual mandate (i.e., the requirement that would force individuals to buy health insurance) and its presumption to know the best interests of consumers better than consumers themselves know it. This is but one facet of the rapacity of the welfare state, but it is both an important and a telling facet.

If individuals believed contemporary individual health insurance policies to be a good deal, these individuals would be clamoring to buy them. That is the way that capitalism works: you offer something for sale; if consumers want what you have for the price you offer it, you sell your product; if consumers do not want what you have for sale, or don’t want to pay your price, you will not sell your product. It is pretty obvious that individuals not covered by employer-sponsored health care coverage (which latter are therefore insulated from the true cost of health care) are not clamoring to buy individual health insurance policies. These policies are not a good deal, and they are becoming a worse deal with the passage of time. These policies cannot compete in the market. In fact, they choose not to compete. Rather than compete, they choose to legislate and litigate.

Health insurance providers have the heavy hand of the welfare state to intervene on their behalf and to force consumers to buy products that consumers will not and would not buy on the open market when free of compulsion. Instead, these policies will be sold upon threat of legal prosecution.

The welfare state intends to provide welfare for all. This is a noble aspiration. No one can rationally argue with the desire to improve the lives of all and to reduce the glaring inequities of our society. (Some on the contemporary left like to say, “When everyone does better, everyone does better” — and this tautology certainly is true.) One can, however, rationally argue with the means intended to accomplish this end. For we all know, in the overwhelming complexity of the world, that unintended consequences often swamp intended consequences, so that means are uncertain in the extreme: particular means may contribute more to the defeat of the intended aim than to eventually securing the intended aim. How, then, should we go about supporting the general welfare in a manner consistent with democracy and liberty?

And there is a tension between democracy and liberty, as embodied in a now well-known quote frequently mis-attributed to Benjamin Franklin: “Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote.” (I have also seen versions of this substituting “rabbit” for “lamb.”) The simplest form of democracy — majoritarianism — is especially vulnerable to this tension. More sophisticated incarnations of democratic ideals have made provisions for individual rights that are not to be infringed even if social consensus supports infringement. This is the enlightened tradition that the Founders extended to the US Constitution, and it is the model that we should continue to follow: the democratic ideal pursued in so far as it is possible, and in such a way that its infringements upon individual liberty are minimized. It is in this spirit that I return to the health care debate.

There is a solution to government coercion in purchasing health care services, but this solution, while simple, is radical in its simplicity and would call into question some of the deepest presuppositions of the welfare state. That makes this alternative politically impossible, no matter how much sense it makes. What is this solution? Simply this: offer the option to “opt out” of health care, i.e., to voluntarily live without health insurance, and to accept the consequences of living without health insurance, essentially opting out and living off the health care grid.

I would opt out, and I would do so with my eyes wide open, and with the knowledge that I would be subject to different protocols in the eventually of illness of injury. And I would be willing to make this official, and to certify my decision to the satisfaction of legal standards of evidence, whatever they might be in the this case. For example, I would be willing to carry a card in my wallet, next to my driver’s license, that in the eventuality of my injury, that I am not to be treated, or taken to a hospital or emergency room, or that only a certain specified amount of money should be spent on my treatment, with this amount of money supported by some oath or affirmation that I possess the amount in question in cash.

Prior to writing this, I have not suggested this to anyone, so I don’t know how others would react. However, it is easy to guess the outrage that would greet my proposal in some quarters. For instance, I can imagine it being said that, while a person feels healthy and fully able, they would say that they would like to opt out, but when it came time to pay the piper, no one would be left who would really and truly accept the consequences of their decision, especially if it meant death or living with disfigurement.

The objection is the same as the old canard that there are no atheists in foxholes: the presumption that, in our hour of need, everyone will fold, without exception, and want the aid and comfort to which scientific medicine entitles us. We know this to be false, because we know principled individuals who accept the consequences of their actions without any attempt to save themselves. Interestingly, however, this argument shows how far we have come in real terms — in terms of the actual ideology by which we live, rather than the ideology that is honored more the breach than in the observance — because the “heath care in extremis” objection is the perfect mirror image of the no-atheists-in-foxholes objection. The no-atheists-in-foxholes claim assumes that in our hour of greatest need that we will all, despite any previous profession made under circumstances of security, seek supernatural aid and comfort. The “heath care in extremis” assumes that we will all, despite any profession made under circumstances of security, seek material aid and comfort. So which is it going to be? Supernatural aid and comfort, or materialistic aid and comfort?

What is it in the welfare state’s conception of human nature that it must embrace the totality of our being, and extract from us our forced consent for our total expropriation by the state, body and soul, such that no exceptions are to be allowed? It is simply this: for the welfare state, man is simply homo economicus. The welfare state is an economic institution; each individual instance of homo economicus is a functioning part of our economic institution; therefore, homo economicus is a functioning part of the welfare state. It is an elegant syllogism that reduces the individual to his role within the state as part to whole.

We must see this development in the context of the evolution and maturation of the institutions of advanced industrialized society. That is to say, we would be misunderstanding the situation if we attributed all of this development to wild-eyed ideologically motivated radicals who have an agenda for a utopian society which would be a dystopia for the rest of us. This is not how most social change comes about. Most social change comes about from incremental changes and attitude and incremental changes in material circumstances, which between the two of them create a coevolutionary spiral and issues in unintended consequences that were no part of anyone’s design. Homo economicus and his role within the economy of the welfare state has not been imposed from above; all of this has emerged organically from historically continuous circumstances.

As always, the wealthy will be left untouched by the law. They will have health care regardless. The individual mandate will fall most heavily on those who have a limited quantity of disposable income and have made a conscious decision to spend that income in a certain way. As the tentacles of the welfare state find there way into the regulation of every aspect of life, like some kind of secular Hadith, every penny of an individual’s income is more and more spoken for by the state before it is earned and spent. One has the “choice” from what company one will purchase health insurance, just as one has a “choice” between buying Crest or Ultrabright toothpaste, but the supposed greater number of choices made available to the individual in modern society are choices not worthy of the name. The real choice has already been made, and it has been made by the welfare state before the individual is even born.

We find here a particularly radical embodiment of the doctrine of implicit consent to a social contract: if you are born into a society, and if you choose to stay, you choose to accept the social contract of that society. In other words, you relinquish all of your rights, in a Hobbesian moment of absolute submission to the Leviathan, in order to receive a few compensatory rights later, as the Leviathan chooses to grant at its discretion. Thus the welfare state arrogates to itself the right to organize your life before you are even born, and once you emerge as an individual within society you are obligated to arrange your affairs, down to the budgeting of your income, according to the dictates of the state. And if your income is limited, and that limited income has already been spoken for by the state and its epigones? That is your tough luck. Next time, come back rich. For this life, cough up your money. All of it, if need be.

Are we going to tell people that it is not a legitimate choice to live fast, die young, and make a beautiful corpse, because this is socially unacceptable? Is it beyond the pale that, if an individual prefers danger to safety, that they should willingly place themselves in danger? And is it unacceptable that an individual should allow himself to take risks? Are we going to tell people that it is unacceptable that they buy a sports car because they need to spend this money instead on health insurance? The welfare state bureaucrat has no problem telling individuals that their choices are not allowed because they do not conform to the economic planning of the welfare state, of which the individual is a part, and the state is the whole.

Thus the welfare state sets itself up like Periander, the despot of Corinth, who, not being satisfied by the example of his father, the despot Kypselos, sent to the famous (or notorious) Thrasybulos of Miletus to learn more effective means of depredations upon his people:

“Now Periander at first was milder than his father; but after he had had dealings through messengers with Thrasybulos the despot of Miletos, he became far more murderous even than Kypselos. For he sent a messenger to Thrasybulos and asked what settlement of affairs was the safest for him to make, in order that he might best govern his State: and Thrasybulos led forth the messenger who had come from Periander out of the city, and entered into a field of growing corn; and as he passed through the crop of corn, while inquiring and asking questions repeatedly of the messenger about the occasion of his coming from Corinth, he kept cutting off the heads of those ears of corn which he saw higher than the rest; and as he cut off their heads he cast them away, until he had destroyed in this manner the finest and richest part of the crop. So having passed through the place and having suggested no word of counsel, he dismissed the messenger. When the messenger returned to Corinth, Periander was anxious to hear the counsel which had been given; but he said that Thrasybulos had given him no counsel, and added that he wondered at the deed of Periander in sending him to such a man, for the man was out of his senses and a waster of his own goods,–relating at the same time that which he had seen Thrasybulos do. So Periander, understanding that which had been done and perceiving that Thrasybulos counselled him to put to death those who were eminent among his subjects, began then to display all manner of evil treatment to the citizens of the State; for whatsoever Kypselos had left undone in killing and driving into exile, this Periander completed.”

Herodotus, Histories, Book V, section 92

It remains to give the theoretical justification of opting out of compulsory spending mandated by the welfare state. It will be objected that, in something so fundamental as health care, opting out would create a two tier system, and ultimately a two tier society, and that this is invidious to democracy. I will, for the moment, leave aside the fact that we already have a stratified society in which many individuals receive preferment and privileges because of their income, social status, or family background. It is fundamentally a question of one’s conception of the law. I have many times remarked that the nation-state system is predicated upon a radical and uncompromising application of the territorial principle in law — that is to say, the principle that one law holds for all individuals within a given geographical region. The historical alternative to the territorial principle of law is the personal principle in law, which is the principle that an individual will be subject to the law of their community, regardless of their geographical location.

The possibility of opting out of government programs appeals to the personal principle in law, and we can see on this basis why representatives of the nation-state — and all of the advanced industrialized nation-states are welfare states — would be opposed in principle to anyone opting out of a territorial principle. The advocate of the exclusive legitimacy of the territorial principle in law must hold that the personal principle in law is illegitimate everywhere and always, and that no legitimate political entity can be erected upon the personal principle in law. If any exceptions are allowed, we would be forced to recognize that our society is shot through with instances in which individuals are held to the standards of their community rather than to universal standards enforced throughout a geographical territory.

As I pointed out above, we do in fact have a stratified society, and whether or not we formally recognize it in our legal codes, we have de facto instances of the personal principle in law that hold throughout our supposedly universal territorial law. To point this out, however, would be to contradict the powers that be. And to allow a separate community that has opted out of the health care mandate, and indeed out of the health care system altogether, would be too glaring an exception to the territorial principle in law to be tolerated.

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The Origins of Institutions

Thursday

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The clash of civilizations, literate and pre-literate: a ‘long and tiresome ceremony’ (according to the diary of James King) in which Captain Cook was honored during the festival of Makahiki. The significance of the ritual and Cook's role in it is still debated, not least because the ritual was not formalized at the time. (http://www.nla.gov.au/exhibitions/omai/pages/text.html)

A few days ago in Twelve Theses on Institutionalized Power I developed some ideas about implicit versus explicit institutions. An implicit social contract I call an informal institution, and an explicit social contract I call a formal institution. While I find this to be a helpful distinction in terms of clarifying our ideas about institutions as we find them today, in medias res, the distinction cannot be extrapolated backward in time beyond a certain threshold of social organization. Prior to the existence of social institutions in societies possessing historical consciousness and some system of recording this historical consciousness, the distinction does not make sense.

I will posit another distinct species of institutions that exist prior to the fully developed distinction between formal and informal institutions. These pre-formal institutions — institutions emergent prior to the possibility of formalization in a social context — I will call incipient institutions.

I previously discussed some of the conceptual issues surrounding the origin of institutions in The Institution of Language, where I wrote the following:

The social rituals of proto-civilizations lack the intellectual and conceptual infrastructure to emerge as fully formal institutions; however — and this is important — these institutions were formalized in the only way that it was possible to formalize an institution prior to the emergence of written language and explicit legal codes. One could argue the horror of pre-literate ritual culture was given its horrendous form precisely because it had to make an unforgettable impression at a time when there was no other way to preserve tradition.

I want to continue to explore this line of thought in relation to incipient institutions. Rituals of the kind I refer to above are institutions. In literate, historical cultures, rituals too are literate and historical, often prescribed in nearly neurotic detail. In pre-literate, pre-historical cultures, rituals are incipient institutions. Some of these incipient institutions will fall away as the culture matures, some will be retained, some will evolve into secular institutions, and some will evolve into sacred institutions, i.e., religious institutions. Just as in ancient Greece there was no clear line between science and philosophy, since these two traditions cold only be sedulously distinguished after human thought had matured to a given threshold, so too in pre-literate, pre-historical cultures there would have been little or no distinction between secular and sacred rituals. There was only the ritual itself, deeply embedded in the life of the people, and no means to preserve the ritual intact but for the impact that it could be given by the form that it took.

Incipient institutions resemble implicit social contracts, i.e., informal institutions, except that they are formalized to the extent that anything can be formalized in a pre-literate, pre-historical milieu. Incipient institutions can be neither formal or informal, because they are pre-formal. No infrastructure yet exists by which they could be formalized. If anything at all could be said to be a formal institution in this social context, then certainly incipient institutions are formalized in this sense — except that nothing at all, in fact, is formalized in this social context, which context is an absence of all formalized institutions.

Incipient institutions may be present in a state of nature on the verge of transition into a state of non-nature, that is to say, an unnatural state, which is the state of organized social institutions, formal institutions. These conditions are most likely to be found among semi-sedentary peoples of the late Paleolithic, still engaged in hunting and gathering, but also experimenting with agriculturalism and pastoralism.

If we use the term incipient institution not only to refer to pre-formal institutions, but also to institutions that are in the process of development, presently informal but moving toward formalization, then incipient institutions would be a characteristic of any period of historical transition. In times of rapid social change, decadent and incipient institutions would overlap and intersect (as Wittgenstein said of family resemblances), the former failing, in terminal decline, and slowly disappearing, the latter vital and slowly emerging.

This formulation of incipient institutions suggests a further distinction between incipient institutions that are not in a process of maturation into formal institutions (which might characterize many pre-literate, pre-historical rituals) and incipient institutions that are in a process of maturation. Within incipient institutions one might be able to recognize those elements that are stable and which will experience little or no development, and those which suggest much more than they make explicit, and therefore are ripe for development.

Also of interest in the above formulation is the use I have made of Wittgenstein’s famous phrase, that family resemblances “overlap and intersect.” As soon as I wrote that I realized that Wittgenstein’s conception of family resemblances is a static concept and could benefit from being set in a temporal context. Family resemblances over time will be distinct from family resemblances at an instant, as it were; to overlap and to intersect in time is distinct from what it is to overlap and intersect in space. Admittedly, the metaphor is primarily spatial, but there is no reason we cannot engage in some conceptual exaptation and use it for temporal and historical purposes. Incipient institutions in a process of develop into formal institutions, as well as decadent institutions in the process of decomposition, will exhibit temporal forms of family resemblance.

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A Dance in Otaheite, John Keyes Sherwin, engraver (1751–1790) after John Webber (1752–1793) London: 1784 engraving; plate mark 26.5 x 41 cm, Rex Nan Kivell Collection NK10975/4, Pictorial Collection U1244

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In the above I have used the hyphenated term pre-historical to indicate cultures prior to the emergence of historical consciousness. I retain the non-hyphenated form, prehistorical, to indicate the period of history prior to the emergence of history in the narrow sense. This is admittedly a subtle distinction — some might say overly subtle — but I find it a distinction worth making.

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Twelve Theses on Institutionalized Power

Monday

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A few days ago I was posting some brief thoughts on Twitter (necessarily brief, given the 140 character limit) about social contract theory, and as the ideas developed I realized that I had something more to say about the exercise of power within institutions. What follows is something of an elaboration of my previously tweeted ideas, which were, in turn, an elaboration of the use of “institutionalized power” as I used that term in Web 2.0: An Alternative Vision.

1. It is not so much power alone that corrupts, as it is institutionalized power that corrupts.

Perhaps in the familiar line, “Power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely,” it is to be implicitly understood that the power in question is institutionalized power and not merely the power of an individual, but we would do well to be specific that it is an institution that transforms the ordinary vitality of life, which is power, into something sinister.

2. Power channeled through institutions raises the arbitrariness of the power of an individual to a higher order of magnitude.

The power of an individual, while potentially dangerous, is limited to the scope of the individual, and the scope of the individual does not extend to a significant reach in either time or space. Thus the arbitrariness of power of an individual is merely the arbitrariness of a bully, but the arbitrariness of a bully allowed the powers of an institution, to be omnipresent and all but omnipotent, is power not subject to the natural limitations inherent in the individual person.

3. Once an individual experiences the aggrandizement of institutionalized power, the scope of merely individual arbitrary power feels paltry.

To be the representative of institutionalized power (which today means holding political office and basking in the power of that office), is to exercise a power that no individual could cultivate himself in isolation, and which no individual could implement without an institutionalized apparatus of power. To hold institutional power is to have more than the reach of an ordinary man, but it is also to be dependent upon others: in other words, it is to be institutionalized.

Herman Melville has made the definitive comment on this condition:

“It cannot have escaped the discernment of any observer of mankind, that, in the presence of its conventional inferiors, conscious imbecility in power often seeks to carry off that imbecility by assumptions of lordly severity. The amount of flogging on board an American man-of-war is, in many cases, in exact proportion to the professional and intellectual incapacity of her officers to command. Thus, in these cases, the law that authorises flogging does but put a scourge into the hand of a fool.”

Herman Melville, White-Jacket: or, The World in a Man-of-War, Chapter 36: “Flogging not Necessary”

While the scourge no longer takes the form of a cat-o’-nine-tails, the principle remains the same, and, similarly, although the fools who wield the scourge are not the same, the arrogance of office is unchanged.

4. In the state of nature there is arbitrary individual power; it is only in the context of social organization that institutionalized arbitrary power emerges.

Arbitrary individual power in a state of nature, without social organization, can at most result in a duel, which will usually be a contest of equals if not rivals, since a non-equal match will result in the disadvantaged party fleeing. Arbitrary institutional power, made possible by social organization, turns every contest into an unequal confrontation of an individual against an institution, with the individual’s ability to flee the confrontation compromised by the same social organization.

5. The state of nature is a condition of absolute impunity and of absolute absence of impunity.

There is a dialectic of impunity when raised to its absolute form, in which an identity between the absolute possession of impunity and the absolute lack of impunity are seen to amount to the same state of affairs. For further elaboration of this thesis cf. the explication of Theses 10 and 11 below.

6. Impunity of power is an institution that emerges in parallel with the institutions of power, but it is an informal institution.

There can only be impunity is a formal sense when there is a law from which one is immune. However, as we shall see below, there is an informal sense of impunity that is realized in the state of nature. But where the formal institutions of power are present, impunity is an exception to the rules that constitute an informal social contract. It should be pointed out, though, that impunity as an informal institution is a peculiarly modern phenomenon, since in pre-modern states legal authorities were almost always exempt from the rule of law, or, if subject to laws, authorities were subject to separate laws — an instance of the personal principle in law not tied to ethnicity or confessional community — as when English Peers of the Realm were tried in the House of Lords or churchmen were tried in ecclesiastical courts according to Canon Law. This, in turn, is another development of formal institutional power, and impunity is an informal exception to formal institutional power. Thus the historical trend is toward the constitution of formal institutions that acknowledge informal exceptions.

7. An informal institution is an implicit social contract. A formal institution is an explicit social contract.

There is always a degree of exchange between the conventions of implicit social contracts and explicit social contracts, so that formal institutions borrow from informal institutions and vice versa. in other words, the distinction between the two is not absolute. But the distinction is nevertheless valid as far as it goes. This must be taken in the spirit of what I have called an unnamed principle and an unnamed fallacy, namely that for any distinction that is made, there will be cases in which the distinction is problematic, but there will also be cases when the distinction is not problematic.

8. The state of nature can be defined as the absence of any social contract, formal or informal, explicit or implicit.

The possibility of an absolute state of nature, lacking either implicit or explicit social contracts immediately suggests the possibility of a relative state of nature in which there may be an explicit social contract but no implicit social contract, or an implicit social contract without an implicit social contract. We can identify the former with corruption and the latter with proto-civilizations. And, again, as above, the distinction between absolute and relative states of nature is not absolute, but remains valid as far as it goes (and subject to the same principle and fallacy noted above).

9. Despite the absence of a social contact in a state of nature, the substance of what we understand by impunity is realized in this condition.

Because in a state of nature, individuals possess the Freudian freedom in which, “their neighbor is for them not only a potential helper or sexual object, but also someone who tempts them to satisfy their aggressiveness on him, to exploit his capacity for work without compensation, to use him sexually without his consent, to seize his possessions, to humiliate him, to cause him pain, to torture and to kill him,” there is no action whatsoever that is forbidden us in a state of nature. We possess absolute impunity to do as we will — and also to suffer as we will.

10. Impunity in a state of nature is something very different from impunity within a social structure.

Although in a state of nature we possess absolute impunity to do as we will, everyone else possesses exactly the same absolute impunity, and nothing in a state of nature puts me beyond the reach of any individual who seeks to behave with impunity toward me any more than such an one is beyond my reach to behave with impunity. In a state of nature, no one is accountable to anyone, and everyone is accountable to everyone.

11. In a state of nature, no one is untouchable, even while everyone is, by definition, beyond the reach of the law.

As there is, by definition, no law in a state of nature, everyone is beyond the reach of an institution that cannot reach out because it does not exist; in other words, everyone is untouchable. But there is also no law to protect the individual, and so no one is untouchable. The two are merely alternative formulations of the same state of affairs.

12. Formal and informal institutions, explicit and implicit social contracts, exist side-by-side, in parallel in a social system.

Institutions feed off each other. The existence of formal institutions require informal institutions that either allow us to circumvent the formal institution or guarantee fair play by obliging everyone to abide by the explicit social contract (something I previously discussed in Fairness and the Social Contract). There is a sense in which formal and informal institutions balance each other, and if the proper equilibrium between the two is not established, social order and social consensus is difficult to come by. However, in the context of mature political institutions, the attempt to find a balance between formal and informal institutions can lead to an escalation in which each seeks to make good the deficits of the others, and if this escalation is not brought to an end by revolution or some other expedient, the result is decadence, understood as an over-determination of both implicit and explicit social contracts.

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Folded, Spindled, Mutilated

Monday

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In the early stages of the Computer Age there were punched paper cards that held data, and in order for the data to be correctly read by the machine the punched cards needed to be kept flat and in good shape. It came to be the custom to print on these punched cards “Do not fold, spindle, or mutilate.” In an early protest against the growing anonymity, depersonalization, and dehumanization of the Machine Age, a slogan began making the rounds — rapidly co-opted for commercial purposes and printed on T-shirts and bumper stickers — that played upon this: “I am a Human Being: Do not fold, spindle, or mutilate.” One must be of a certain age to remember this.

All of us are folded, spindled, and mutilated to a greater or lesser degree. Some of us do it to ourselves through self-destructive behavior, and some of us have it visited upon us by the unwanted attentions of a hostile world. It is natural to look for someone to blame so that we have on object — a scapegoat — upon which we can unleash our anger and indignation. It is natural, but it is also dishonest. Most of the forces that fold, spindle, and mutilate our lives are embodied not in an individual but in what Braudel called the structures of everyday life. That is to say, our lives are mutilated by forces that are much larger than any individual, and which cannot be changed by even the most heroic efforts of an individual.

Steven Lubar of the Smithsonian Institution has an interesting essay available online on the topic of early punch cards: “Do not fold, spindle or mutilate: A cultural history of the punch card.” In this essay Lubar writes:

“In the 1930s the University of Iowa used cards for student registration; on each card was printed “Do not fold or bend this card.” Cards reproduced in an IBM sales brochure of the 1930s read “Do not fold, tear, or mutilate this card” and “Do not fold tear or destroy.” I’m not sure when the canonical “Do not fold, spindle, or mutilate” first appeared; it’s one of those traditions whose author and origin is lost in the mists of time.”

There are also apparently at least a couple of books devoted to the topic.

In her famous essay A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf discusses how the life of the heroine of Charlotte Brontë’s novel Jane Eyre is stunted and deformed because of the social circumstances of the time in which the novel was written. That is to say, the structures of everyday life were, for Charlotte Brontë, oppressive. Woolf made a comparison between Tolstoy and Brontë (as well as George Eliot):

“At the same time, on the other side of Europe, there was a young man living freely with this gipsy or with that great lady; going to the wars; picking up unhindered and uncensored all that varied experience of human life which served him so splendidly later when he came to write his books. Had Tolstoi lived at the Priory in seclusion with a married lady ‘cut off from what is called the world,’ however edifying the moral lesson, he could scarcely, I thought, have written War and Peace.”

Of Brontë herself Woolf wrote:

“…one sees that she will never get her genius expressed whole and entire. Her books will be deformed and twisted. She will write in a rage where she should write calmly. She will write foolishly where she should write wisely. She will write of herself where she should write of her characters. She is at war with her lot. How could she help but die young, cramped and thwarted?”

And who is not at war with their lot? How many of us are satisfied with our lot, or accept it peacefully? Who can accept with equanimity the outrages and injustices of the world? And if someone could simply accept this without rebelling, would we suppose that this was for the better, or that such an one lacked some essential human spark? The condition of which Woolf writes is not only the condition of female novelists of the nineteenth century; it is also the human condition.

Few if any of us express our genius (if we possess any) whole and entire. T. S. Eliot wrote in his repudiated book, After Strange Gods, “…the damage of a lifetime, and of having been born in an unsettled society, cannot be repaired at the moment of composition.” (I quoted this previously in Microcosm/Macrocosm.)

As the life of Brontë was “deformed and twisted,” “cramped and thwarted,” so are many if not most lives. The theme has inspired some of the greatest poetry in the English language. Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Church-Yard” is a meditation upon thwarted lives:

Perhaps in this neglected spot is laid
Some heart once pregnant with celestial fire;
Hands, that the rod of empire might have sway’d,
Or waked to ecstasy the living lyre:

But Knowledge to their eyes her ample page,
Rich with the spoils of time, did ne’er unroll;
Chill Penury repress’d their noble rage,
And froze the genial current of the soul.

Gray even conscientiously recognizes both the possibilities of fame and ignominy:

Some mute inglorious Milton here may rest,
Some Cromwell, guiltless of his country’s blood.

Gray tells the story of those lives that were folded, spindled, and mutilated long before there were such things as computer punch cards. Indeed, the lives that Gray celebrates in his poetry were lived under the agricultural paradigm, so we see that deformed and thwarted lives are not unique to industrialized civilization. Industrialization may accelerate and exacerbate the deformation of lives, but the problem does not originate with industrialization.

It is relatively easy to think of examples of lives thwarted by spectacular episodes in history, like war or terrorism, but by far the most pervasive forces that thwart lives are those rooted in the Braudelian formulation I used above, the structures of everyday life. As implied by Gray’s Elegy, poverty and rural isolation once thwarted a great many lives. Rural isolation is less of a concern now, and is diminishing over time, but poverty, and the fear of poverty, continues to mark lives the world over.

Most of all, fear in its many forms deforms, twists, and cramps our lives. Economic fear is for the industrial paradigm the equivalent to the pervasive fear of hunger under the agricultural paradigm. When almost everyone worked on the land, and the land was only marginally productive, a bad harvest meant hunger or starvation in the coming winter. This was true from the advent of the neolithic agricultural revolution to the industrial revolution. Now almost everyone works at a job instead of working on the land, and a bad economic harvest — a recession or other economic dislocation — means hardship and possibly also financial ruin and penury.

One thing that European observers of the US often get wrong is in not understanding the role of fear in the US economy. The social safety net in Europe is relatively generous. Go to a large European city, even a large city of the former Eastern Bloc, and you will see almost no street people. I know whereof I speak; I have been to almost every major city in Europe. As fellow industrialized peoples, the Europeans ought to understand the Americans if anyone does (perhaps also the Japanese), but in fact they do not — and Americans similarly misunderstand the Europeans.

In the US, fear of loss of one’s job, fear of poverty, fear of homelessness, is real and palpable. Talk to people and you will hear it in their voices and see it in their faces. It is one of the things that makes life in the US a little bit weird at times, as when you see people spiraling out of control over little things (like the current tempest in a teapot over TSA screeners) and it becomes all-too-apparent from a studied distance that this is misplaced anxiety that, according to a classic psychodynamic model, is being expressed in a safe way, because one cannot express one’s fear directly because that would call into question the foundations upon which one has constructed one’s life.

There are also many more subtle forces that thwart lives, and the more subtle they become, the more pervasively they are inter-woven into our lives, the more difficult it is to be objective and honest about what is thwarting us. Let me put myself out on a limb and give a specific example: a great many people (especially those of the working class) marry young and have children very young, without thinking about it. Some are impelled by biology, and some by cultural context, but whatever the motivation (or, more likely, lack of motivation, so that it is mere inertia that creates one’s situation), the result is the same, and that result, more often than not, is feeling trapped by circumstances. In middle age I have come to see how many people are tolerating rather than enjoying their lives, often resentful of their situation, feeling trapped in their marriages and trapped by their obligations to children. Sometimes these obligations are spelled out in legal proceedings, but most of the time it is a moral obligation that is felt, staying together “for the children” and not wanting to “rock the boat.”

Ultimately we fold, spindle, and mutilate ourselves. There is no other to blame (and no anonymous, faceless machine to blame), though we may grasp at straws and blame scapegoats for our situation. In our honest moments, we know this. Much of the time if not most of the time, our unhappiness follows almost inevitably from the choices we have made. But we should not be too hard on ourselves for having disappointed ourselves, as we are all of us working from imperfect information (to borrow a term from economics).

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Why Revolutions Happen

Monday

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A few days ago in Fairness and the Social Contract I wrote regarding Joseph de Maistre’s Essai sur le principe générateur des constitutions politiques et des autres institutions humaines (“Essay on the Generative Principle of Political Constitutions and other Human Institutions,” 1809) that its formulations, “invite alternatives if not refutation.” I offered a formulation parallel to Comte de Maistre in terms of fairness or justice being the approximation of the explicit social contract to the implicit social contract.

Another way to formulate this would be to say that it is Nietzsche’s “morality of mores.” (In German: “die Sittlichkeit der Sitte”, also translated as the “morality of custom,” which I discussed in The Totemic Paradigm) allowed to grow, to mature, and to evolve into a formal legal system. That is to say, beyond the morality of custom lies legal precedent and the legislation of custom. One could argue that the English common law tradition embodies precisely this gradual accumulation of custom, which, by being rendered in formal legal judgments, is then transformed into a legal norm. This common law tradition is law outside the constitutional paradigm, though a similar process can occur in the context of the constitutional paradigm.

In an earlier discussion of the law, Exaptation of the Law, I argued that, “…the law is intrinsically conservative, or, perhaps better (as that ideological word invites misunderstanding), law has an intrinsic bias in favor of the past.” I made this claim primarily based upon the role of precedent in law: “A ruling in the past establishes a convention that is followed in later rulings and preserves the past into the present.” And when a traditional system of law is overthrown in a revolution, “Laws and constitutions are not written in a vacuum,” so that the past remains a consistent point of reference.

Even the absence of law can establish a precedent. In the cases of tyranny, in which political authority is exercised without legal precedent, tyranny often becomes the rule rather than the exception in a society once conditioned to tyranny. I believe that the record of history demonstrates that tyrannies cannot long endure, but I will admit without hesitation that when a tyranny is deposed the power vacuum is often filled by a regime that is in no sense better and is often worse.

Tyranny is the illegal exercise of political authority. The idea of political tyranny is a familiar one, but there are also intellectual forms of tyranny that are no less invidious. Either through socio-political repression of alternatives or through social inertia or through lack of imagination, some ideas come to dominate societies to the exclusion of other ideas. Some of these ideas can be remarkably one-sided and unbalanced. In so far as an insitution is an embodiment of an idea, if it is the embodiment of a one-sided idea it is a form of intellectual tyranny and it will not long endure.

In the above-mentioned post Fairness and the Social Contract I claimed that a formulation of political society that was obviously extreme (like Comte de Maistre’s) invites a critique precisely because alternatives are schematically suggested by the structure of the ideas in the initial formulation. I also maintain that an idea that invites a critique in this way will eventually be faced with its other. If socio-political factors prevent the timely reckoning of an institutionalized idea with its other, that institution will grow corrupt and decadent. What happens with a corrupt and decadent institution? It is eventually overthrown, even if it is not confronted by its other.

One socio-political force that militates against a timely reckoning of an institutionalized idea with its other is what I have called acculturation to absence of change. I introduced this idea in my Political Economy of Globalization, where I wrote:

Proto-economic activity on the cusp of transformation into commercial economic activity has been the common condition of the bulk of human history. It constitutes the whole of our much longer pre-history, and is a powerful acculturation to absence of change. One engages in the same activities that engaged one’s ancestors since time immemorial, and the very idea of change, competition, or adaptation is foreign. The world is what it is, has always been so, and always will be so, world without end, Amen Thesis 28

When an entrenched, established, and institutionalized idea grows corrupt and decadent, but continues to cling to power through socio-political inertia and acculturation to absence of change, revolution becomes the only possible mechanism of change.

In several earlier posts I discussed the possibility of formulating intelligent institutions. An intelligent institution would be capable of adapting itself to changed circumstances. The kind of ideas embodied in institutions that I have described above have not fostered intelligent institutions. Among its other adaptive behaviors, an intelligent institution would be open to the revision of the idea upon which it is based. An idea open to revision does not become a form of intellectual tyranny. If change is possible — that is to say, if reform is possible — revolution is no longer the only expedient of change.

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French Canaries in a Global Coal Mine

Saturday

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The French are protesting again — out on strike and marching in the streets. So what’s new? Nothing, in so far as the protest goes; this is standard fare for French society, and has been so since 1789. But the particular trigger for the protests, while not exactly new, is one of those “tip of the iceberg” things that bodes ill for the future.

The French protests of the moment are over pensions. The French government wants to make pensions slightly less generous. Compared to the benefits available in the US, even the scaled back French benefits sound rather generous. The plan in France was to increase the retirement age from 60 to 62 and the full state pension age from 65 to 67. For the French, this was a sufficient outrage to hit the streets protesting. There is a sense in which we can view such a protest as nearly comical, but there is another sense in which even a quibble over two years is deadly serious.

A few days ago in Fairness and the Social Contract I discussed implicit social contracts by which societies function. I suggested that the recent protests in Ecuador were due to the violation of an implicit social contract. The government of Ecuador was trying to cut the benefits of civil servants, and civil servants are a potent political force in small and poor countries. France is neither a small nor a poor country, but its civil service is also a politically potent force. Ever since Richilieu’s consolidation of absolute monarchy under Louis XIV, France has had a highly bureaucratic society, and this tradition of bureaucratic and centralized authority survived the transition of the French Revolution and remains intact to this day.

Bureaucratic states, like constitutionally chartered states, attempt to formalize the implicit social contract in explicit social institutions. As economic development and technological progress has continually improved standards of living in the industrialized democracies of Western Europe, another implicit social contract begins to emerge in the form of a sense of entitlement. When life continues to get better over several generations, many people believe that they are entitled to a better (and less onerous) life than that enjoyed by the parents, and they expect in turn that their children will have yet better (and yet less onerous) lives than they have had. Thus to change the retirement age is seen to be a violation of this social contract.

A pension is a serious promise; people count upon it for their livelihood in their old age, when they are perhaps more vulnerable than any other time in their life, with the exception of their childhood. To change what has been promised to an entire society is going to cause anger, frustration, and protest. I certainly understand this. But I also understand that industrialized societies have dramatically over-promised, and they simply are not in a position to pay out the benefits that are scheduled to be paid out.

This is true in the US as well. The Social Security system will go bankrupt and be unable to make good on its promises at some point in the not too distant future unless retirement ages are raised, benefits are reduced, or taxes are increased. People like myself who have paid into the Social Security system for our entire working lives may well see little or nothing from it. This is an economic reality that cannot be wished away. We may not want to renege on an implicit social contract, but economic necessity will force us to do so. Because if we don’t renege on Social Security’s over-promised benefits, we will be forced to renege on other implicit social contracts, like the rate at which workers are taxed. To dramatically raise taxes simply to pay Social Security benefits would be to violate an implicit social contract between tax payers and the government. So one way or another, an implicit social contract is going to be violated, and when that happens a lot of people are going to be made very unhappy.

One cannot blame those who crafted the pension systems of contemporary nation-states. When the first state pension systems were created in Western Europe, industrialization had begun but families still reflected the only recently abandoned agricultural paradigm. In other words, families had large numbers of children. And one can no more blame them for this than one can in good conscience blame those set up the pension systems on the basis of assumptions that no longer hold good. The assumptions were valid at the time the programs were initiated, but the law of unintended consequences has caught up with the social safety net.

For as industrialization matured in those nation-states in which it first took root, dramatic social changes followed that were unprecedented and which could not have been predicted by anyone. I previously discussed this in Industrialization and Low Birth Rates. The small family sizes of today would never have been imagined in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century.

And this was not the only unprecedented change. Technological progress included progress in medical science, and as a result death rates plunged and life expectancy dramatically increased in industrialized nation-states. When pension systems were created, almost everyone died even before they had a chance to draw a single pension check. The systems were intended to prevent the extreme poverty of the few who survived into old age. This was not a large burden at the time such social programs were conceived and begun. In has, in the interim, become a rather substantial burden. Now people expect to survive their retirement age by ten or twenty or even thirty years.

The bottom line is that no society can afford to support a large proportion of its population not working for a quarter or a third of its life expectancy. It is unfortunate that promises were made when economies were booming and growing during the early stages of industrialization and the population to be support through such measures was small, but societies have in fact over-promised, and if they do not scale back on their promises they will be ruined. People don’t like to hear it, but if they are going to be healthy into their 70s and 80s and 90s, they are going to have to work. The social support network can only function if people work nearly until they die. It may not be “fair,” and a typical working-class job held into one’s dotage might not be any better fate to look forward to than the lot of a medieval peasant laboring on the land until he dies at 40 or 50, but it is the way things are, like it or not.

It is interesting to see how industrialization has more or less created this problem which is perhaps the greatest threat to industrialized society. In the pre-industrialized past, the care of the elderly and infirm was limited in so far as few elderly or infirm survived. But those that did survive could count on an extended household of multiple generations as a social safety net. And this extended household of multiple generations was itself situated in the context of a manorial economy which was itself a greatly extended household of many generations. The end of the manorial system of subsistence agriculture broke up the noble estates, and with dissolution also came the dissolution of the sense of noblesse oblige that often went with the institution of the manor. The mobility of the labor force both encouraged and demanded by contemporary capitalism further eventually resulted in the dissolution of multi-generational households. Thus these is no place for the elderly and infirm to go in an society transformed by the institutions of industrialism. In a rapidly changing world in which change is the only constant, how could there be a place for the old to rest until they die?

Every social system carries within itself the seeds of its own destruction. A civilization is the balancing act that a society manages between its burgeoning possibilities and its self-imposed limitations. This was true of the civilization of classical antiquity, which spectacularly collapsed in the West, it was true of medieval civilization, which was transformed into modernity gradually, and it is true of our own civilization. I suspect that the sophistication of our methods and technologies will allow us to maintain the balancing act imposed upon us by the intrinsic limitations of our social system for a longer period of time than managed by classical antiquity or the Middle Ages, so we have some time to go yet. But maintaining our balance will come at a certain cost as we teeter dangerously on the edge of what is possible for industrialized society.

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Fairness and the Social Contract

Tuesday

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A coup or a violation of an implicit social contract?

Recently in A coup in Ecuador? I made the claim that, “The protest in Ecuador was that benefits were to be cut for civil servants. This constitutes a breach of an implicit social contract.” Further developing the theme of distinct social contracts in distinct socio-political systems I wrote:

It is an accepted practice that, in advanced industrialized and democratized economies, members of the political class become rich after they leave office, not while they are in office… In poorer countries, it is accepted practice that members of the political class (or members of the civil service) become rich while they are in office, because there will be few opportunities to make money after that.

More than a year ago in China’s Social Contract I quoted Chris Hogg of the BBC from his Sink or swim in modern China as follows:

“There is an implicit bargain in modern Chinese society between the leaders and the led. Beijing tells its people ‘we will give you opportunities’ — to earn more, to enjoy a better standard of living than your parents did. But you, in return, will behave yourself.”

And then I continued:

This has been a consistent theme of commentary on the Chinese political situation over the past decade or so. The Chinese ruling elites of the communist party and the Chinese people are abiding by an informal social contract, such that the government will continue to deliver economic growth and opportunities to its people, and the people will not challenge the leadership of the Communist Party of China (CPC). I have encountered this in many different contexts, enough so that it may be considered part of the standard repertoire of talking points for talking heads.

Constitutional government, which has become the norm throughout the world (though often honored more in the breach than the observance), is an attempt to formalize a social contract in explicit terms. However, an examination of history since the emergence of the constitutional paradigm reveals that, despite formal arrangements of governmentality, implicit social contracts persist. Sometimes these implicit social contracts represent a curtailment of doctrines formalized in a constitution, and sometime these implicit social contracts represent promises made above and beyond the doctrines formalized in a constitution.

The US Constitution, a paradigmatic Enlightenment era document, is also Exhibit 'A' in the constitutional paradigm of the nation-state system.

In any case, an explicitly formulated constitution is only part of how a society functions, and sometimes it is only a small part. The most common cases of this that come to mind are those egregious examples of nation-states that have constitutions replete with glittering generalities about democracy, opportunity, and freedom of expression — explicit promises that are not fulfilled in fact. The various constituent republics of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics all had constitutions that guaranteed all manner of edifying freedoms, while almost none of these were observed in practice.

The several republics of the USSR promised much in their constitutions but failed to deliver on these promises.

Perhaps most if not all constitutionally chartered nation-states begin in this way. In Becoming What We Are I noted that Martin Luther King jr’s famous “I have a dream” speech appeals to the unfulfilled promise of the American dream that all men are created equal. Indeed, it was only in the twentieth century that many of the constitutional protections that we take for granted in the US began to be taken seriously and were enforced by courts and the law.

The survival of implicit social contracts within nation-states administered according to the constitutional paradigm suggests the possibilities of a widening gap or a narrowing gap between implicit and explicit social contracts. The example I cite above of the US only coming lately to a respect of its explicitly stated constitutional paradigm is an example of a narrowing gap between implicit and explicit social contracts. One of the remarkable things about the US (and perhaps a source of “American exceptionalism”) is that the current implicit social contract (reaching back to perhaps some time near the beginning of the twentieth century) is that the explicit social contract will be respected and put into practice as far as practically possible. This is not entirely unique to the US. In the Scandinavian countries, for example, there is a widespread social consensus of narrowing the gap between political appearance and political reality.

Implicit and explicit social contracts coincide in Scandinavia and the US.

It has become a commonplace of contemporary political commentary that US, NATO, and western military and peace-keeping operations constitute the attempt to impose a social system upon non-western peoples who live according to different social systems. Certainly many of us in the US have come to view the coincidence of implicit and explicit social contracts as a social virtue and even as a mark of fairness. But “fairness” is a slippery term. I know people who refer to the word “fair” as “the four-letter F-word” because of its overuse, misuse, and abuse.

With the above considerations in mind, I came to the realization today that in most societies “fairness” may be defined as that state of affairs in which the social contract is respected and put into practice, while it is a breach of fairness when the social contract is not respected and not put into practice. This picture, however, is complicated by the divide between implicit and explicit social contracts. One way to view the situation would be to hold that a people understands fairness (or, better perhaps, “justice”) as the approximation of the explicit social contract to the implicit social contract. In other words, in so far as the explicit social contract explicitly formulates and formalizes the implicit social contract by which a people is already living, then this is fairness or justice.

Joseph-Marie, comte de Maistre, 01 April 1753 to 26 February 1821

This is a deeply conservative formulation. It is closely parallel not only to what we find in Edmund Burke, but even the point of view to be found in Joseph de Maistre. The latter wrote a wonderfully concise essay, Essai sur le principe générateur des constitutions politiques et des autres institutions humaines (“Essay on the Generative Principle of Political Constitutions and other Human Institutions,” 1809), that more or less pursues this line of thought. In section IX of this essay, de Maistre formulates the following four propositions:

1. The fundamental principles of political constitutions exist prior to all written law.

2. Constititional law is and can only be the development or sanction of a pre-existing and unwritten law.

3. What is most essential, most inherently constitutional and truly fundamental law is never written, and could not be, without endangering the State.

4. The weakness and fragility of a constitution are actually in direct proportion to the number of written constitutional articles.

Once we understand the theoretical foundations of a highly conservative formulation of political society, we can schematically formulate liberal and radical conceptions of political society in contradistinction to the theoretical basis of conservativism. Certainly the first of de Maistre’s principles stated above — “The fundamental principles of political constitutions exist prior to all written law” — invites alternatives if not refutation. For starters, it stands in stark contradiction to the whole tradition of legal positivism that has been the foundation of Western legal thinking for at least the past hundred years. Indeed, one could argue that legal positivism emerged in Western history as a reaction to Old World doctrines such as those of Edmund Burke and Joseph de Maistre.

This is something that I will be thinking about in the coming days.

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Note added 13 October 2010: Today the BBC carried a story, Chinese veteran politicians call for reform, with this observation: “A group of 23 Communist Party elders in China has written a letter calling for an end to the country’s restrictions on freedom of speech. The letter says freedom of expression is promised in the Chinese constitution but not allowed in practice.” A translation of the actual text of the letter can be read at the Chinese Media Project.

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A Coup in Ecuador?

Thursday

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The Ecuador I know and love is not a dangerous place rife with coups and banditos; truth be told, it is rather sleepy and quiet.

The media began by reporting a protest and now is reporting a “coup attempt.” This is hyperbole and histrionics. Today’s events in Ecuador are much more a protest than anything else. That these events have since been reported as a coup attempt says many different things — about the readiness to dismiss Ecuador as a perennial weak nation-state that periodically suffers from coups, at the readiness of the public to believe such things, about the readiness of the media to play to a stereotype, and the readiness of political clowns like Hugo Chavez to get involved and, in the process, turn a protest into a soapbox and thereby contribute to the escalation of the event.

A coup is planned and plotted. Powers operating behind the scenes seek the right moment to strike out at a weak political structure, taking its leaders out of action (possibly by assassinating them), and replacing them with other leaders, which often means military leaders and martial law. Perhaps not all coups d’état are systematic in their planning and execution, and perhaps not all coups d’état are total in their aspiration to bring down one government and replace it with another, but a coup does need some degree of planning and some preparation for a new government once the blow, the coup de grâce, is struck. Without these elements present, it is not only tendentious and irresponsible to call a protest a coup, it is also dangerous.

We have another word for a protest that spirals out of control and ends up bringing down a government and replacing it with another. It is of the essence that such a sequence of events is unplanned. It happens catastrophically, and gains momentum relentlessly, beyond the power of agents provocateurs or fifth columns or agitators or cadres to control once they have unleashed the latent forces at work. The word we use for this is revolution. I have written about the spontaneous and snowballing character of revolutions in Revolutionary Violence. A revolution is quite a different matter from a coup d’état.

I am not suggesting that there is a revolution occurring in Ecuador. There is no more a revolution here than there is a coup. What there is here are a lot of disgruntled people who are seeking a redress of their grievances with the government. Some of these disgruntled and discontented people were police officers and military men, but that does not make their protest into a coup.

Looking out over Quito, the only crowd of people you are likely to see is when passers by have stopped to watch a soccer match on a television in a store window.

To understand how this protest started, and how this protest escalated, you must adopt a very different point of view than that of the industrialized countries (and, statistically speaking, if you are reading this you are likely to be in an industrialized nation-state). In an advanced industrialized economy, the greatest rewards are conferred upon those who are successful in private industry. One makes far more money by being a captain of industry than by being the president of the greatest superpower in world history. Ideally, in the advanced democracies, public service is seen as a service, and many people in public service regard their service as a sacrifice because they could be making more in private industry. It is an accepted practice that, in advanced economies, members of the political class become rich after they leave office, not while they are in office.

A typical street scene in Quito: quiet and orderly.

This state of affairs does not obtain in poor countries. In many nation-states politely referred to as “industrializing” or “underdeveloped” or even “the third world” the most stable and lucrative position that you can get is to be in the government, or, if you can’t manage to get into a high government post, to obtain a position in the civil service. The pay is usually regular and more dependable than in private industry, and there are perks that come with the job. In many places in the world, a job in the civil service is seen as a sinecure than you hang on to for dear life. In poorer countries, it is accepted practice that members of the political class (or members of the civil service) become rich while they are in office, because there will be no opportunities to make money after that. Extreme cases of this are called kleptocracy. The protest in Ecuador was that benefits were to be cut for civil servants. This constitutes a breach of an implicit social contract.

If you visit Ecuador, this is likely the only 'civil disturbance' you will encounter.

Thus this protest might look like one part of the government turning upon another part of the government, and thus can appear not unlike a coup, but what is going on is that those in stable and lucrative government jobs what to keep their perks and benefits coming. The protesters are not ideological enemies of the regime who want social transformation; they are not out to eliminate the dominant role of the government in the economy that is so common in less developed countries; they don’t want to bring down the government, what they want is a bigger piece of the pie. This is not a coup, this a protest of entitlement. This is the antithesis of a coup or a revolution, it is a reaction. The protesters, if anything, are counter-revolutionaries.

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In the quiet valleys of the Avenue of the Volcanoes, nothing at all is changed by the protests in the capital.

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A Note on Social Contract Theory

Wednesday

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Social contract theory is a major branch of contemporary political philosophy that traces its roots primarily to Hobbes and Rousseau. The basic idea of social contract theory is that legitimate political authority is derived from the consent of individuals who assent to a contract that delivers them from the hazards of a “state of nature” into a state of civil government. It’s a quid pro quo: you give something (liberty) to get something (security).

Thomas Hobbes

Contemporary political philosophy is dominated by the work of John Rawls, who is accounted something of a social contractarian, so social contract theory must be considered relevant today. A confession: I personally don’t get the fascination with Rawls. I don’t find his writings to be philosophically very interesting; nevertheless, his contemporary influence is the philosophical “ground truth” and we have to start with the facts on the ground. Also, social contract theory, like any part of philosophy, is not without its critics, some of them bitterly opposed to the very idea of a social contract.

Not Hobbes the cartoon character

What is a “state of nature”? Hobbes famously described life in the state of nature as “solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short.” We can get a pretty clear idea of the state of nature from Freud’s Civilization and its Discontents, where Freud describes man without the curbs imposed upon him by civilization:

…men are not gentle creatures who want to be loved, and who at the most can defend themselves if they are attack; they are, on the contrary, creatures among whose instinctual endowments is to be reckoned a powerful share of aggressiveness. As a result, their neighbor is for them not only a potential helper or sexual object, but also someone who tempts them to satisfy their aggressiveness on him, to exploit his capacity for work without compensation, to use him sexually without his consent, to seize his possessions, to humiliate him, to cause him pain, to torture and to kill him. Homo homini lupus. Who, in the face of all his experience of life and of history, will have the courage to dispute this assertion? As a rule this cruel aggressiveness waits for some provocation or puts itself at the service of some other purpose, whose goal might also have been reached by milder measures. In circumstances that are favorable to it, when the mental counter-forces which ordinarily inhibit it are out of action, it also manifests itself spontaneously and reveals man as a savage beast to whom consideration towards his own kind is something alien.

Freud is such a great writer that it is hard not to quote him at length. I could easily have transcribed more of this passage. Here, Freud really nails it.

That we find these closely related ideas in Hobbes and Freud should alert us to the fact that this topic can be treated in terms of political theory or natural science. Freud was not making recommendations for constitutional reform, and Hobbes was not suggesting that disappointed members of the body politic should receive therapy in order to reconcile themselves to their condition.

Social contract theory has been typically formulated so as to emphasize that those who enter into the social contract surrender their rights and liberties in exchange for security and survival. Hobbes in particular produces some disconcerting formulations that make the contemporary reader squirm. It is almost as if these social contractarians were seeking demonstrate their doctrine through the method of isolation, starkly setting life alone, stripped of its freedoms, and asking us the forced question of whether we would take such a life, humbled to be sure though enjoying safety and security, or risk our lives and the lives of our families to the sort of conditions that Freud described.

Hobbes assumes that we are risk averse, and it has been suggested that Rawl’s contemporary formulation of social contract theory assumes that if we could choose a society from behind a “veil of ignorance” about our position in that society, we would inevitably be risk averse and choose the safest option. This is a weakness of the theory, though I do not think that it is a fatal weakness. Many men are risk takers and would gladly join the fray of the state of nature, but once a man has a family and a position in the world he would not be so ready to risk it all, and he would not likely throw his children into the fray as readily as he would commit himself.

Keeping both Hobbes and Freud in mind, let us ask another question of social contract theory. If we surrender our absolute rights of the state of nature for no rights or abridged rights within a social community for the sake of survival, what then is it that survives? What is a social contract intended to preserve?

I don’t think that Hobbes would have thought in these terms, but it could be said that the social contract is nothing less than a mechanism to assure the survival of the species. Under some circumstances this could be an entirely legitimate concern. In the film adaptation of Heinlein’s novel Starship Troopers we are shown a nearly fascist society that has been entirely organized for war (a future Sparta, as it were) so as to preserve the human species from alien attack. One of the central characters, Carl, proclaims:

We’re in this for the species, boys
and girls. It’s simple numbers, they
have more, and every day I have to
make decisions that send hundreds of
people like you to their deaths.

However, under the sort of circumstances we have encountered to date in our history, the human species is not seriously under threat from the state of nature, so that a social contract instituted for the survival of a species, while potentially a valid exercise, is a matter for speculation and not for action.

One might plausibly maintain that the social contract is instituted to secure the survival of the state. Now, in its simplest form this simply won’t work, because the state is in fact the product of a social contract. So we would have to say that the social contract creates a state, and once seeing that the state is good, determines that the highest good is to maintain this state in existence. While my formulation is a bit awkward, it is not difficult to imagine that one could give the idea a formulation that would make it seem a bit more plausible.

But not necessarily so. The survival of the state, the goal of what is often called the reason of state (Staatsräson, raison d’état) or the national interest, is an appeal to the security and survival of the community, so that in any such community so defended the individuals have surrendered their rights and liberties not for their own security and survival but for the security and survival of the community putatively established for the security and survival of individuals — a vicious circle in which the individual must always lose. I can imagine a credulous communitarian swallowing this, but it won’t convince many others.

Suppose we then settle on the obvious and say that what survives by the guarantee provided by the social contract is the individual who relinquishes his rights and assents to be a part of the community. There certainly are a great many situations in ordinary life in which we can imagine that men would strike such a deal. In fact, civil communities are now pervasive throughout the world, so much so that most contemporary men would feel lost without a civilization to give his life meaning and direction.

While striking the deal of individual freedom for individual safety is understandable, there is an important sense in which we have to ask whether the individual as such really does survive under these conditions.

What is the individual life? If life is intrinsically the kind of exercise of absolute freedom that Freud described (including the possibility of suffering the same fate oneself), then life in civil society, after signing on the dotted line of the social contract, is life so transformed as to be unrecognizable. If one could ask a Viking if he would give up his life of raiding and plundering defenseless coastal communities so that he might become like the people he had been, to date, killing and robbing, he would probably take offense at the very idea of it.

For the authentic nomad, hunter-gatherer, raider, plunderer, noble or ignoble savage, the life of absolute freedom — the life of the state of nature — is the only life in which honor and achievement are possible. To assent to a social contract would be to so eviscerate life that life would no longer we worth living. In other words, that the one thing that the social contract offers, physical safety for the individual, would not be worth having. Would a berserker sign a social contract? I think not.

Once you've experienced the exhilaration of a drug-fueled homicidal rage, the comforts of civilization would be cold comfort indeed.

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China’s Social Contract

Sunday

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The abridgment of ambition

The first sentence of David Rapport Lachterman’s book The Ethics of Geometry: A Genealogy of Modernity is something I think of often: “To write a book is to be schooled in the abridgment of ambition.” Anyone who has tried to write knows how true this is. Writing a post for this forum is a daily abridgment of ambition, as to say something coherent and meaningful in the space of the stolen moments that constitute the interstices of my day is not always an easy task. A few days ago I started writing about China, and of course the post became impossibly large in my mind even before I began to type.

One must, in a context such as this, confine oneself to the smallest possible thought that can be coherently assembled in the space of a few paragraphs. This entails obvious compromises and precludes any kind of systematic or historically adequate treatment of a question. One is more or less limited to commenting on a sound bite, so for today’s sound bite I will cite a recent BBC story.

A “sound bite” on China

In Sink or swim in modern China by Chris Hogg, we find the following:

“There is an implicit bargain in modern Chinese society between the leaders and the led. Beijing tells its people ‘we will give you opportunities’ — to earn more, to enjoy a better standard of living than your parents did. But you, in return, will behave yourself.”

This has been a consistent theme of commentary on the Chinese political situation over the past decade or so. The Chinese ruling elites of the communist party and the Chinese people are abiding by an informal social contract, such that the government will continue to deliver economic growth and opportunities to its people, and the people will not challenge the leadership of the Communist Party of China (CPC). I have encountered this in many different contexts, enough so that it may be considered part of the standard repertoire of talking points for talking heads.

Going beyond conventional wisdom

Thinking individuals have a duty and a responsibility to question conventional wisdom, to subject it to scrutiny, and to push such conventional wisdom beyond the bounds of convention to determine its value and veracity. What, then, is the value and veracity of the current conventional wisdom that the CPC and the Chinese people are abiding by an implicit social contract?

Is the Chinese governing elite in a position to guarantee to its people sustained and significant economic growth? And, whether or not they can in fact do so, do the Chinese political elites believe that they can do so? Well, starting with the second, the Chinese communist leadership has shown itself to be sufficiently pragmatic to remain in control of China, and this is no small feat. We must assume that they are rational and not deluded in regard to the basic way the world works. Thus we should assume that they have no illusions about their ability to continue to deliver economic growth and opportunities if it is simply not possible. Which brings us back to the first question, and the answer to this is obviously that the growth cannot be sustained indefinitely, but it can nevertheless be sustained for a significant period of time.

China’s Industrial Revolution

It is been my consistent talking point that China is experiencing an industrial revolution, a one-time historical transition that began in England in the late eighteenth century, occurred in Western Europe in the nineteenth century, and in Japan and North America in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. China’s industrial revolution spans the late twentieth century to the early twenty-first century.

As long as China’s industrial revolution is transforming the economy of that country, China can sustain continued economic growth even while the rest of the world experiences recession. And despite being in the third decade of an industrial revolution, China has a long way to go. While the coastal cities are wealthy and have more or less completed the process of industrialization, the poorer, agriculturally dominated interior of the country is in places untouched by industrialization, and wherever there remains a primarily agricultural economy the work of an industrial revolution is not completed.

Even in advanced industrialized economies in Western Europe and North America there are areas of poverty, but this poverty is no longer defined in terms of subsistence agriculture but rather in terms of unemployment, and unemployment is only a meaningful figure when subsistence agriculture has been abandoned and the majority of the population must earn its living by other means. Thus the poverty of Western China, with its dense pattern of villages engaged in subsistence agriculture, is not unlike the poverty of Appalachia prior to the arrival of the coal industry in the early twentieth century.

China as a mature industrialized economy

When China’s industrial revolution reaches a plateau, and its economic development levels out, what has been identified as China’s de facto social contract will no longer be able to function. The Chinese political elites can maintain growth at present without showing any great measure of imagination or inventiveness. They must be competent and shrewd managers, and since the Chinese have long had a deserved reputation as businessmen, we can expect that China’s current leadership will be capable of sustaining the present status quo of growth. The virtues of competent men of business will play into the hands of the current communist party leadership in China. But when real imagination and inventiveness are required, these same virtues will fail the leadership, and they will continue to behave like stodgy businessmen when it is the flair of the entrepreneur (if not the vision of a prophet) is what is needed.

How long can this go on? Several decades more, at least. Each society that industrializes has its own unique culture and its own unique history. This culture and this history facilitates some things while frustrating others. Development is always a mixed bag, always leaves some dissatisfied and disenfranchised, and reaches some sooner than others.

Is the pragmatic leadership of China content with assuring their rule for the next few decades, and leaving the farther future to chance? Or does the CPC believe in its ability to maintain a one-party system with ideological control in the advanced industrial economy of China’s future? Clearly the Chinese interest in space exploration implies that the party is looking to the long term, and wants something at once both visionary and nationalistic in which the people can take pride. Will this, along with other initiatives, be enough to satisfy the mass of the Chinese people?

It was enough to satisfy the US during the Cold War. Similar forces were at play: international rivalry, a space race that was the focus of national pride (though not the only focus), and political repression that did not seriously affect America’s technological and industrial expertise. The McCarthy-era political repression stifled dissent in the US for a generation while not preventing its international competitiveness. And the McCarthy era was not ended by a revolution or a sudden change, but by social evolution. It could be argued that the social evolution of the US, which in the 1960s came close to being revolutionary, only could take place once a social consensus had been established that simply excluded the possibility real and fundamental radicalization. Once revolution is taken off the table, as it were, it becomes easier to tolerate dissent, because everyone knows that the dissent is ultimately impotent. However vociferous the left may be in the US, everyone knows that behind the rhetoric there is no threat of social revolution or even of general strikes.

Perestroika and Glasnost in China

Making the appropriate changes for differences in culture and history (mutatis mutandis, as they say), it would be plausible to expect parallel developments in China over the next hundred years, picking up as China’s industrial revolution tapers off. The important difference being that the communist leadership in China will, through selective political repression, seek to create a social consensus that simply takes Western-style political liberalism off the table altogether, though in the long term the Chinese leadership will need to allow liberalization of press freedoms. In other words, the Chinese have perestroika in full swing; next they will need to accommodate glasnost.

This seems to me to be a sufficient realistic and pragmatic assessment that the communist leadership of China could plausibly believe in its ability to secure its long term rule by such means. What this scenario neglects is the likelihood of “strategic shocks” that could be game-changes for the international system. The “international system” such as it is always errs on the side of stability and predictability, and so shuns developments that might upset the apple cart. But strategic shocks, by their very nature unpredictable, are virtually guaranteed by a system that, by favoring stability, perpetuates unsustainable arrangements that become increasingly more catastrophically unstable over time. As we all know, the bigger they come, the harder they fall. The international system is big indeed, and its fall would be hard in proportion.

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Note added 29 July 2010: A BBC story, China considers big rocket power, discusses the proposed Chinese development of quite large rockets that would be a real boost to the Chinese space program, thus a boost to national prestige in a time of economic uncertainty, thus a boost to the CPC.

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Wang Hsi-chih Calligraphing a Fan Album leaf, ink on paper, 31.3 x 58.9 cm, National Palace Museum, Taipei

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