Tuesday, October 30, 2018

The center cannot hold (the nuts and bolts of how “this” goes to hell)


These last weeks have given us more examples of the demise of traditional parties, and the rise of groups that the MSM likes to portray as “extremists” or, until recently, “fringe”:

·         The Brazilian presidential election has been won by Jair Bolsonaro, widely depicted as the local version of Donald Trump because of his incendiary declarations condemning homosexuals and darkly warning of the dangers of a “communist threat” that, after almost 14 years of PT (workers’ party) government, probably existed only in his fevered head

·         Two consecutive regional elections in Germany (in Bavaria and in Hesse) have seen the collapse to its lowest levels since WWII of the traditional center-right (the Christian-Democrat CDU and its Bavarian variant, the CSU) and center-left (the social democrats of the SPD), and the concomitant rise of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) and the Greens (considered not long ago to be far-left, but in these confused times who knows how they are classified any more)

Those electoral tidings that resonate with a number of similar ones (the election of Donald Trump in the USA, the victory of Brexit in the UK, the formation of a government dominated by the Lega Norte in Italy, the ascent of Marine Le Pen’s National Front in France, the consolidation in power of the authoritarian forces coalescing around Erdogan in Turkey, Orban in Hungary and Kaczinsky in Poland, etc.) which I already analyzed in a previous post The allure of populism .
In this post, I want to provide a further explanation of why those forces are in the ascendant, why we can expect to see many more of them winning elections, governing and consolidating their hold on power, and why, far from preventing the collapse I mentioned in my last post (Decline and fall, indeed ) they are the surest sign of its inevitability. We won’t avoid “this” collapsing by electing extremists and letting them try (foreordained to fail) alternatives to the current social compact, we will rather ensure that “this” goes to hell in a swifter, speedier fashion, as those “alternatives” promising easy fixes to complex problems, once given the chance to actually spread their fairy dust over the electoral body, will miserably fail and only hasten the demise of “this”.

“This”, of course, being our current socioeconomic system, and its dominant reason (the ideological underpinning that both justifies it and keeps it humming along by indoctrinating every member of society to play by certain rules that, although noxious for each individual, happen to be great to smother any alternative that may be presented). To understand why the failure of the “extremist” or “populist” alternatives is unavoidable, let’s quickly summarize the problems that affect every single one of today’s societies, stated as succinctly and pithily as possible (so do not expect any of my usual rhetorical flourishes in the following enumeration):

1.       Demographic collapse of advanced (and middle-income) economies, with number of births in all of Europe, America (North and South), Oceania and North of Africa and Asia below replacement levels (not yet in India, but getting there surefootedly), and increasing life expectation causing a ballooning of unfunded liabilities in the most advanced economies in the form of medical costs and social security for retirees that the new generations will be unable to provide

2.       Demographic explosion of Sub-Saharan Africa, that increasingly depends on the rest of the world to feed a population that keeps growing (as the increasing amount of international help barely compensates the increase in mouths to feed, they stay at about the same level of poverty, that in turn keeps the incentives for having as many babies as possible in place… for a notably delirious and pigheaded analysis of the problem see Douthat: all of Europe's problems would disappear if womin went back to having seven babies each )

3.       Increasing intra-country inequality, somewhat compensated by a shrinking inter-country one. But at some point, Chinese peasants will be more riled up by the differing fortunes between themselves and rich city-dwellers than by the joy of seeing the diminishing differences between them and rust belt Americans. And who knows? May be rust belt Americans will stop being assuaged by the fact the blacks and Latinos still have it worse than themselves, and will in turn be riled up by the fact that all the improvements in wealth production of the last fifty years have been vacuumed up by the richest 1% between them

4.       Environmental degradation, caused by the increasing pressure of a growing/ much grown population on a finite planet. Such degradation takes the form of shrinking wild habitats, loss of biodiversity and, the one with the biggest potential for worsening our quality of life, anthropogenic climate change

5.       Technological stagnation or, rather, technological development of the “wrong” technologies: we do not invent much that help us produce more material goods with less effort (thus, we are getting significantly worse at generating energy, extracting less and less Megawatts from each megawatt devoted to the production of the required infrastructure, ditto for transportation, agriculture, residential building and space exploration), but such lack of inventiveness and technological development is clouded (and people are kept ignorant about it) by the stupendous development of technologies to capture our attention and entertain us (aka dupe us, fool us, lie to us, deceive us, delude us, distract us and whatnot)

Those are serious problems. Because of them, the generation that today have between 0 and 15 years in the advanced economies will have the dubious honor of being the first, since the collapse of the Roman Empire of the West, to enjoy a life materially worse than their parents’ (the Chinese and Indians and Latin Americans may get a bit more mileage from playing catch up, in their case may be its two generations down the line that will have that same distinction). They will have ubiquitous Internet access and will enjoy almost for free any entertainment we can dream of, but Alas! That entertainment will be dismal, crappy and despondent. How do I know? Because dying, decadent societies are unable to create great art. Creating durable, inspiring, arresting art requires believing there are things that really matter, identifying oneself with great narratives bigger than us, being able to sacrifice one’s own comfort for the good of others or for the sake of self-expression, or believing in sources of meaning outside of the material world. And almost nobody in the West or in the East, in the Northern hemisphere or in the Southern one, truly believes in that any more. They can only be cynical, post-modern, self-referential, jaded, detached. More Banksy than Michel Angelo. More Jay Z than Beethoven. So yep, they will populate the noosphere (or the memeplex, or whatever idiotic name the clever studious of the virtual reality want to concoct) with catchy images and catchy tunes and catchy, snazzy ideas (expressed in less than 140 characters, who has time for more than that?) that will go viral in ever shortening times, and be consumed by ever increasing amounts of rapt audiences, only to be forgotten as fast, in the perpetual pursuit of the latest fad and the latest trend, all equally perishable and equally fast forgotten. What’s more, that deluge of empty entertainment will not make us a iota happier, will not make our life a iota worthier, and will not, thus, make us want to propagate it a iota more than now (which is not much, see problem #1).

But before we get there (the nuts and bolts I mentioned in the title, more about them in a moment), let us review what answers the “traditional” (i.e. non-populist) parties, the representatives of the majority of the people (according to the establishment) are offering to those serious, seemingly intractable problems:

·         From the right, we hear that

o   1. Is no problem at all: less people? More riches to enjoy between the remaining ones! And if we really want more people (i.e. if we took the demographic suicide of advanced and not-so-advanced economies seriously) all we would need to do was ban abortions and limit access to contraceptives! (never mind European societies have been successfully controlling their reproduction rates since the XVIII century, when abortion was as effectively banned as the most traditional conservative could dream of and no contraceptives existed)

o   2. Is a convenient excuse for more socially regressive policies: those dark guys pouring over our frontiers are the source of all our social problems, give more weapons to the police to keep them out and send back those who seep inside!

o   3. Is a blessing: inequality spurs innovation and incentivizes the right behavior by rewarding the industrious entrepreneurs that create wealth for all and punishing the lazy, undeserving poor

o   4. Is a temporary blip: if we keep on incentivizing those same industrious entrepreneurs they will come up with technology-based solutions to those problems (clean energy technologies! Carbon capture to reverse climate change! Cloning to retrieve extinguished species! Age-reversing medicine to make us immortal!)

o   5. Is not happening at all: thanks to Moore law, technological change has not only not stagnated, but is still accelerating. What if TFP is not increasing as it used to? It is surely a measurement error, and we are one expansive cycle away from reaching a post-scarcity society where we will be able to tie dogs with sausages!

·         Whilst from the traditional left we receive the following messages regarding the challenges we face:

o   1. Is no problem at all: less people? Less pressure on the sacred Earth! We humans are a cancer on the planet, anyways, so the less of us there is the better!

o   2. Is a convenient excuse for more redistribution: those unlucky individuals are not responsible for being born in the wrong place (true), so they have as good a claim as us to the collective benefits our society bestows on its undeserving members (false, if their enjoyment of such benefits would make said benefits disappear both for them and for us, as is sadly the case), thus we have to welcome as many of them as possible, in order to force the rich to give more of their illegitimately accrued wealth to the rest

o   3. Is a temporary blip that can be corrected with a bit more of social engineering and state intervention (although it is unclear how that intervention is supposed to work, after in the 90’s and aughts social democrat parties in Europe essentially subscribed to the neoliberal creed and lowered taxes, deregulated protected industries and committed to balanced budgets regardless of business cycle): the modern left agrees with the modern right that the first imperative is to grow the economy with low inflation, and only after that has been achieved may some (very minor) redistribution be considered. If there is no growth, no redistribution will be abetted (see Greece for the last ten years)

o   4. Is not happening at all: the only environment to be concerned about is the social environment. There is no such thing as nature, only what we create with our labor (and labor relations can only take the form of class conflict, because we all belong to a class, namely exploiters or exploited, rapacious capitalists or progress-bearing proletarians), so animal species disappearing or the planet warming is of no consequence, other than by its potential influence on what class finishes on top in the centuries long struggle

o   5. Is a blessing: that so-called technological advance was a source of disruption and stress for the weakest members of society (the blue-collar workers that constitute the majority of the membership of leftist parties), so the less there is of it the better. Lowbrow culture available to all is great, as all that snotty highbrow was a conspiracy of the elites to identify their own members and collectively disregard the good, honest entertainment of the subjugated masses

So traditional parties may switch some message here and wiggle some answer there, but what both the left and the right have in common is a complete lack of solutions to our society’s most pressing problems. Instead of solutions, they offer the following (what, for lack of a better term, we may call distractions, or more directly, canards):

·         The great lie of the right is that we are not yet rich enough, our economy is simply not producing enough goods, so the first imperative is to make it grow even faster. Some good things (more individual freedom of choice) and some very bad ones (less solidarity and a more frayed safety network in the form of less guaranteed, mandatory health and unemployment insurance) are presented as the necessary price that it is reasonable to pay in order to achieve that accelerated growth. Look, I get that growth in the West has been, until now, a very considerable net gain for almost everybody. I see that there is an airtight, super-strong case for growing the economies of Botswana, India, Bangladesh and Vietnam (among many other) before considering how that growth is distributed. But Germany? Sweden? The good ol’ US of A? If they had to choose between producing more goods and enjoying more leisure time, or producing more goods and ensuring everybody has health insurance and nobody goes bankrupt because of an unexpected serious illness… I know very well what morality would unabashedly demand: bring on the vacations and the socialized medicine! Even if they require higher marginal taxes for individuals and/or corporations, which in turn cause a bit less growth (a causal relationship that is in no way as firmly established as its proponents would like you to believe). The case for the opposite is looking more and more morally suspect, as the Republican party of the USA makes more apparent every passing day.

·         The great lie of the Left is that we all belong to some oppressed minority, and that only through collective action can we redress such oppression and improve our sad lot. Women? Victims of the hideous patriarchy that single-handedly explains why there aren’t as many female CEOs as male ones, plus of the almost universal prevalence of rape and sexual harassment, to which 99% of them are daily subjected. Homosexuals? Victims of permanent and widespread homophobia that marginalizes them and silences them and physically harms them through countless hate crimes. Immigrants? Heroic, hard-working saints in pursuit of a better life, animated only by their desire to improve their descendants’ lot in life and unfailingly respectful of their host countries traditions and norms. Racial minorities? If they are not all millionaires it is because society is rife with racism and discrimination, they are given no opportunities at all, the system is uniformly rigged against them and the police and the judicature conspire to keep them down, massively (and unjustly) incarcerates them, when not downright guns them down. Transgender people? As homosexuals but on steroids regarding how brutalized and attacked they have been (so deserving an extra dose of sympathy and support, that in the USA apparently starts and ends with signaling the bathrooms they can use).

Those elements, so prominent in the public discourse of the traditional parties, are finding less and less enthusiasm, and are less and less able to mobilize their dwindling bases because they appeal to non-existing problems (or to problems that few people, outside of the think tanks and university campuses from which those parties recruit their cadres, consider relevant). In the meantime, the real problems, the five problems I enumerated, are either ignored or given false solutions, condemned to fail. And as long as they are not solved, which would probably require the reformulation of the dominant reason that organizes social life (something that I’m afraid no single human being, doesn’t matter how enlightened or persuasive or convincing, can accomplish), they will keep getting worse. And all of us will be worse off because of them, trundling along in a society that is more inimical to human flourishing, where we spend more time in school/vocational training/ university (online or otherwise) but we learn less and less, where we eat worse quality food, we live in lower quality buildings, we breathe lower quality air, we wear lower quality clothes, we go from one uninspiring place to the next more slowly, in a less efficient vehicle (doesn’t matter if it has an internal combustion engine, like current cars or planes, or an electric one, like many current trains, which only displaces where the pollution is generated). But boy, will we be entertained in the way! By ubiquitous screens, absorbing our attention every single second with a steady flow of trash that will make current reality TV look like Socrates discourses during the Athenian enlightenment in comparison.

Maybe we will still vote, maybe we will give up on democracy altogether, because we finally realize all options on offer are but aspects of the ruthless defense of the same hapless plutocracy, intent on corralling every last atom of material wealth produced and siphoning it towards the lucky few that consume the same crap (ideological or otherwise) than everybody else, only in greater abundance and with one small twist: they will delude themselves believing they somehow deserve their superior riches, their differential access to those material goods everybody is so unhappily producing, whilst paying them a pittance, the bare minimum to keep them alive and servile enough to tend to their every whim in exchange for the scraps of their continuous feasting. They will try to convince everybody else of that same mantra, of course (that is, they will keep on selling the ideological justification of such inequality: the meritocracy myth and all that), and for some time they will succeed (see the current state of the USA and UK politics if you need an illustration of how such a society may look like) but I have a strong hunch that at some point they will stop pretending, and just cancel the whole charade and keep the masses subjugated through (stale) bread and (high-def, VR enhanced) circus, without giving them a say on how they are governed (too complex and technical, you know, to leave a bunch of rubes decide on such substantial issues).

Until that final state (universal dictatorship supporting appalling levels of inequality) is reached, the three key aspects to pay attention to in how the decline of the current social order plays out are:

-          Corruption as the symptom of the disaffection between elites and the rest (that thus becomes a proletariat in the Toynbeean sense), and as the common theme of dissatisfaction with established parties and experts from all disciplines. Perceived corruption of all the political choices on offer will be (as it has usually been in the past) the final argument for the abolition of democracy and popular participation in the decision of how society is governed and what laws are enacted. Expect, thus, higher and higher levels of corruption at all levels, ceaselessly denounced by the free press (while there is such a thing, being a useful tool of justification of the rule of the few) until nobody cares any more about it and it is widely accepted as just the usual way of doing business.

-          Lack of legitimacy of all the institutions (political parties, unions, established churches that align themselves with the temporal power, even civic institutions, that end up also aligned with one tribe or other), derived from the fact that they are (correctly) seen as answering to non-existing problems while ignoring the real ones. Again, what today would be perceived as an illegitimate form of government (a military dictatorship, say) may not be so once every other option has been similarly discredited. Expect the army to be one of the last institutions to be discredited, and thus at some point to be the one the oligarchy (that’s me and my pals, in case you have forgotten) turns to in order to buttress a collapsing social order.

-          Remember, finally, how according to Toynbee in the collapsing phase of every civilizational unit the proletariat always finds a common narrative, alternative (and typically despised by) to the one embraced by the elites, to give meaning and make sense of their condition. A new universal religion still has to take shape and inspire the proletariat to overthrow the current elite that is hoarding all the economic growth (the future that has indeed arrived, but unequally), and at this point I for one has no clue about what shape that universal religion may take. It may be (my preferred option) a revival of the existing one, cleansed of its most unsavory elements. It may be something entirely new we still have not heard of. Be it as it may, we will contemplate it with dismay, we will despise it and accuse its followers of irrationality and fanaticism and bigotry and idiocy. But they will teach it to future generations, while the values we cherish will be seen as corrupted and false. 

In summary: expect the five big problems to get worse, democracy to wither away, corruption to balloon (even from its currently stratospheric level, to be soon dwarfed by what is to come) and finally, some obscure sect propounding barely intelligible nonsense to catch the imagination of the masses and finally to overturn our current order. Whatever comes next, I have no clue, and I can only pray it is not worse than what we have now in front of us (or than the last five thousand years, which have been dismal enough).

No comments:

Post a Comment