Some anxious
readers of this fine blog have been complaining of late that the frequency of
my musings has decidedly diminished of late, and wonder if my much decreased
output is due to an irreversible disenchantment with the medium, or is rather a
temporary blip, hopefully to be soon reversed. Difficult to say for sure. I
enjoy writing furiously almost unintelligible blabber as much as ever, but it’s
true that the number of my commitments has increased, with the career in
mathematics and the demands of the weightlifting club. It doesn’t help that
April and May are usually the busiest months at work (I’m the head of the
quality organization within my firm, and in May we pass our annual
certification with external auditors, which require a lot of attention). So for
the foreseeable future my posts will be few and far between, and I’ll need to
compensate my faithful followers with extra doses of quality (in the form of
pungency of the commentary on the follies of our current and past mores, rather
than in brevity and pithiness, of course) as a form of compensation for the
decrease in quantity…
Now to the
matter at hand: I finished a couple weeks ago a rather infuriating book by a
retired editor that had published too many Marxist historians, and it showed,
as he had himself imbibed too much of their wacky outlook during his
professional career. Nothing unusual or shocking that would merit a post to
comment, as Marxist historiography in Continental Europe held almost a monopoly
position within the opinion of the learned since the end of WWII. To make
things worse, the author in this sad case was Spanish, where a Marxist
orientation was almost mandatory if you wanted to be published in the
post-dictatorship squalid intellectual milieu of the last decades of the last
century. The result could be summarized as a mediocre book by an incurious
author (incuriosity masked by the mandatory hundred pages of bibliographical
notes containing all the canonical leftist blabber, plus some liberals in the
Anglo Saxon tradition to keep the appearance of academic impartiality) that
leans too heavily in every conceivable stereotype and commonplace to describe a
century (the XVIII) whose intellectual forces he barely understands. But such
lack of understanding is in itself revealing, as he essentially takes a trope
well loved by left-leaning thinkers the world over, namely, the fact that every
product of the human spirit, be it art, political discourse, philosophy or the
arrangement of society itself, is a manifestation of “ideology” to mask the
only thing that really matters: the relationships of production (in Marxese,
the fact that owners of capital force the proletariat to sell their labor for a
pittance, to extract from them the maximum benefit trying to compensate for an
ever diminishing rate of return on their investments) and runs with it as long
as it would allow (it could be argued that he indeed runs with such tired trope
a few hundreds of pages longer than what it would allow, but let’s be
charitable here).
Our
author (whose name will be left unsaid, there is no need to publicize mediocre
writing) doesn’t resort to the pseudo-economicist language his brethren is so
sadly famous for (I use the prefix because the relationship between a Marxist
and Economics is similar to that between a logical positivist and Religion;
they may dabble in opinions about its syntax and how their statements are built,
they may, that is, pontificate about the “object language” without actually
being able to use it for its original purpose, without really “getting” it),
and relies instead in a simpler concept that seems easier to grasp: what makes
our own age awful, and made the XVIII century in the West even more awful (and
I would argue made the whole of human history everywhere else the absolutely
most awful thing ever, but the author seems strangely unable to reach that
self-evident conclusion, as it would imply that our current age was the
less-awful actually obtaining in the real world’s history, something no
self-respecting leftist could ever agree with) was its appalling inequality, an
inequality whose defense and justification is the ultimate explanation of everything
that every historical character of that time and place set out to do: Mozart
operas (“the magic flute” first and foremost among them)? A mere justification
for growing differences in wealth and income. The American, English and French
revolutions? A shameless power grab by elites to ensure they could increase
their exploitation of the hapless populace. Hume, Voltaire, Rousseau and Kant’s
philosophy (an odd mixture if there ever was one)? All barefaced defenses of
the great unfairness of their society. The ultimate force behind the Industrial
Revolution? The desire of greedy capitalists to amass more material goods and
differentiate themselves from the toiling masses (and their sequestration of
the legislative process to ensure they could do so in ever more egregious
ways).
Not
especially subtle (or original, again) but it got me thinking about how the
perspective of every author is tinted (defined by) his previous political
persuasion, and how a few simple concepts (like inequality, in this admittedly somewhat
extreme case) are marshalled to provide an explanatory scaffolding far beyond
what their ramshackle frame would allow them to comfortably do. It is probably
an unavoidable part of our mental architecture, and surely we all do it to a
greater or lesser degree. So I started considering how my own thinking may be
constrained (or oriented) by my own big idea (the fact that a lot of social
constructions, from the most complex organizations to the most everyday
individual decisions, are guided by what I’ve called “dominant reason”, which
can be summarized as the collectively agreed upon answers to three key
questions: “what is the ultimate goal of life?”, “what desires are socially
legitimized to attain such goal?” and “how is socially precedence determined
(and thus, how are conflicts between individual’s desires solved)?”). And it
dawned on me that such big idea could indeed be applied to classify, and better
understand the political persuasion of most people, not only the residual and
somewhat nostalgic leftovers that constitute the dwindling crop pf disciples of
Marx.
It stands to
reason that although everybody participates in the main tenets of such dominant
reason (everybody is aware of them, as they constitute the default answer to
such questions that he may individually offer, prior to any reflection), not
everybody endorses them with the same enthusiasm. Every society has its
critics, and some are more vocal than others. While most criticize some
accessory aspects of the social organization, advocating very minor changes
(like the substitution of one governing party by another within the same
constitutional framework, which I’m learning more and more is of very little
consequence), a few others go against the most fundamental elements that serve
as foundation for the whole social edifice. That allows for grouping very
naturally political tendencies that, although apparently very different, share
between them a definite “family air”, just by considering their attitude
towards the current dominant reason. That way you may find that certain strain
of conservatism and certain strain of progressivism have more in common than
what immediately meets the eye. When the terms “right” and “left” were coined (that
was in the States General of France in 1788, according to where the
representatives of the Nobility, Clerisy and the “third state” sat), being more
or less for maintaining the institutions of the Ancien Régime could be a meaningful distinction, but nowadays it
most certainly is not.
Accepting
then that such attitude towards the dominant reason of the age is one defining
feature of every political persuasion, we may identify a further dimension for
distinguishing between those that reject it (or share a basically negative
outlook) if we focus on what they would replace it with. Is it something that
has already been dominant in our history, or something entirely new? If the
former, how close is what they yearn for in time? If the latter, how
hierarchical is what they envision as an alternative to today’s system?
Given the
characterization along those two dimensions, we could elegantly plot the
existing political options in the following diagram:
Which I would argue defines the different
political outlooks of our days better than other, more traditional
classifications, typically along a single axis (like progressive vs.
conservative, or democratic vs. authoritarian, or individualistic vs. communal).
Our taxonomy would then classify the different political philosophies:
-
According
to their attitude towards the dominant reason we find first the ones that
enthusiastically endorse it (considering more of it should be applied, so it
more fully and completely determines your own and everybody else’s life). Let
us call them either libertarians (desiderative reason is highly accommodating to
possessive individualism, and it can be argued that it has indeed provided for
unprecedented levels of individual freedom) or neo-liberals. Both groups
overlap, albeit do not entirely coincide: the first appellation is most used in
the USA and the 2nd in Europe, but both refer to people relatively
opposed to state intervention in the economy and oriented to a mythical laissez faire economy in which the
“market” optimally regulates what is produced and how it is distributed,
externalities be damned. Note that the opposition to state intervention can be
construed as a rejection of any interference with social status being determined
by anything different than the possessions any individual is able to acquire
all by himself (one of the central features of desiderative reason), as the
dreaded state intervention introduces a redistributionist tendency that
necessarily alters the “natural” outcome of the market with some exogenous
criteria. Distinct from those enthusiastic endorsers we would have people which
overall agree with the prevailing dominant reason, but rather than making it
“more” desiderative would try to fix it in its current form, which already requires
a significant participation of the State in the economy (understood, in opposition
with the former groups, as acceptable), and which could admit of an even
greater intervention to reduce the inequality of outcomes that the unfettered
operation of the markets may produce. As the size of the public sector in most
advanced economies is relatively high compared with the historical standard
(much, much higher if we extend the comparison to the eras before the
development of modern, technologically advanced Nation-States) such people
today tend to be classed broadly as conservatives, if they are happy with the
last four decades of growing inequality, and consider such an acceptable price
to the concomitant increase in GDP (however inequitable distributed -they tend
to be in the winning side) or social-democrats (a more European label, in the
USA they are simply those aligned with the Democratic party) if they have
become increasingly queasy about it. The important thing about those two latest
groups is that, as we’ve already stated, they are both essentially happy with
the status quo, and think that very minor tweaks are necessary to maintain it
humming along (just putting their preferred representatives in power, identified
with a political party within the purported democracy in which they think they
live). Also happy with the current desiderative reason, but unhappy about how
it is being applied we have the populists, with which we will deal in more
detail separately. For now, it is enough to note that they are attracted by the
current system of values (which they understand as a meritocracy) but not by
the way it’s being, or has recently been, applied (as it enhances the social
recognition, and gives all the spoils of the social product, to “others”
defined in a way that excludes them, based on criteria they can not share) which
makes them willing to bet the house on untested formulas that promise to
correct such wrong. Finally, we would have the (so far mostly in the fringe,
and with little prospect of acquiring political power anytime soon) outright
critics (considering the current dominant reason, and its subsequent social
system, an unmitigated disaster that cries for being replaced with something
better).
-
To
analyze the latter, it serves us better to resort to the second dimension, that
is, which is the alternative dominant reason they consider optimal, be it a
future (mostly undefined) one, or any of its past incarnations. In the former
case, I’ve labeled anybody who doesn’t want to share in the dominant reason of
any age, including the present one, an anarchist, as they obviously have a
problem with settled and commonly accepted rules, be they for determining hierarchies
(they would rather dispense with all of them outright) or for establishing what
a life well lived looks like (better to leave each individual define it for him
or herself -punctiliousness in gender assignations seem to be a fastidious
feature of the anarchist tradition). As a brief aside, such outlook, which I
have looked with great sympathy in the past, is extremely naïve (Duh!) and
self-contradictory. As I’ve said in many other forums, people con not
auto-legislate individually the foundation of their morals, or in other terms,
give themselves an ultimate goal in life and decide in a vacuum what desires
are acceptable and which ones are not. All of those have to be socially
provided to boot, and they are both the prerequisite and the consequence of any
minimally functioning society (as we see in our own current one, less functioning
by the day as the agreement on such issues wanes and weakens). You can aspire
to change the dominant reason, but it is irrational and misguided to aspire to
live collectively without any reason being dominant at all in the sense I’ve
described…
So let’s
commiserate poor anarchists for a moment, forever doomed to vie for a dominant reason
perpetually in the future because of their wholesale rejection of the current
one, whatever the current one happens to be (indeed, since the creation of the
movement they have already rejected, and rightly so, the two types of reason
that have become dominant: both the bureaucratic one, against which they
rebelled in the first international, and the desiderative one, which they
currently fulminate). They are joined in their rejection by traditionalists and
counterrevolutionaries and legitimists and reactionaries of different stripes,
which similarly reject the current reason, but in their case because they would
like it to return to a (typically highly idealized) past. Such past may be more
or less remote: Marxists would like a restoration of bureaucratic reason, and
have the state fully determine everybody’s position in the social hierarchy;
Nationalists would like a restoration of romantic reason, and the genius (the
ability to embody the spirit of the people, the mythical volk) of each gifted individual being again the sole determinant of
the recognition (and eventually the material wealth associated to such
recognition) to be granted to him; Alt-righters (or Neoreactionaries) have
upped the ante, and are claiming for the rejection of the whole modern project
embodied in the three last iterations of the dominant reason, which would take
us all the way back to Baroque reason, where the ultimate goal in life was not
to satisfy desires, but to prepare for the next life, social rank was
determined by birth and only simple, survival-oriented desires (eat good food,
have a nice house and a comfortable bed) were socially sanctioned.
Surprisingly, they reveal their affinity with the other publicly visible group
today that espouses such quaint views of how the good life and the good society
that would nurture it look like: radical Islamists (Wahhabis) equally suspicious
of modernity, that would like to take society to a pre-modern state not that
different from the one proposed by Mencius Moldbug, Nick Land, Andrew Anglin
and the like (well, the clothing, the traditions and the race of the simple,
contented masses lorded over by the übermensch
that know better may be different, but that’s all).
But before leaving my readers to
ponder about such fanciful taxonomy of the political kingdom and its consequences,
I would like to dwell a little more on the particular taxa that has forcefully
occupied the limelight of late: the populists. According to my schema,
populists in all ages are essentially conformists that agree with the three
tenets of the dominant reason, but feel slighted by the results of its
application. There are interesting ways of interpreting great upheavals in
human history as populist movements acquiring power and finding out that they
could not just redistribute more of the social product to their followers while
keeping the ultimate goal of life, the acceptable desires to achieve it and the
criteria for deciding who should take precedence in case of conflicting desires
between individuals intact, so ended up overturning the dominant reason in
which they thought they were comfortable enough:
·
In
a big European country, towards the end of the XVIII century (under Baroque
reason, although a neighboring country on the other side of a certain channel
had already started moving towards the next type), a relatively new class (the
commercial bourgeoisie) just wanted to pay less taxes (but at the same time enjoying
a similar level of national prestige and security, which required noblemen and
priests to pay a bit more). They all publicly professed a religion that in
private they mostly despised (but not as much as the aforementioned noblemen).
They all harbored the same simple desires and, by seeking to buy a nobility
title as soon as their rents permitted, agreed that birth was the main
determinant of social precedence. They saw that poor harvests had bred a level
of popular discontent between the peasantry that allowed for minor tweaks in
the existing system they thought were enough to improve their lot. And they
ended up causing the French Revolution, the Terror, the fall of the Old Regime
and the consolidation of a new kind of dominant reason in all of Europe and its
American colonies.
·
In
a much bigger country, straddling Europe and Asia, at the beginning of the XX
century (but living in a complicated mixture of reasons that had not fully
congealed in a coherent whole that could be called dominant, hence the
difficulties of the ruling dynasty to translate the country’s many natural
riches in power and international recognition) a group of daring intellectuals
tried to harness social discontent from a foreign war gone wrong to impose the
rule of a tiny minority (nominally the urban proletariat, in reality y a cadre
of opportunists and bandits extracted from the very scarce students of certain
branch of German political philosophy) over a huge majority of illiterate
peasants. In this case, they succeeded in imposing the reason that was already
dominant in the rest of Europe (bureaucratic), developing it in the general direction
of more despotism (the Asian tradition?) and less respect for human life and
flourishing.
The two previous cases show us populism
before democracy, so it was a populism of certain factions of the elites vying
for power and trying to grab a larger share of the pie, that only in an
advanced phase resort to the masses to strengthen their hand and unleash forces
they are typically not able to contain and that end up consuming them (the
proverbial revolution devouring its sons). I’ll analyze now two cases that
happen in the more familiar milieu of representative democracy and party
politics:
·
Again,
big European country that had been the poster child of the improvement in
material wealth and shared prosperity that bureaucratic reason can generate,
with a vibrant cultural life and universities that, both in research and
applied science cause the envy of the world. Unfortunately, its cultural and
material success makes it arrogant, and it ends up caught in a global war that
destroys most of its infrastructure and ends up losing. Far from uniting the
population, it ushers a wave of cross-recrimination that is only exacerbated
when an international economic crisis sinks its economy even further. Along
comes a clear sighted leader, that tells everybody that everything will be OK.
He’ll make the country great again without having to change mental habits or
old hierarchies. Their dominant reason had not failed them, the motive it was
not working any more was that a powerful cabal of secret conspirators was thwarting
the normal outcomes of the democratic process, so if they kicked them out,
everything would be good again. The guy barely wins a contested election, but
scrapes by to form a government that in few months has monopolized all the levers
of power within the country, and embarks in a furious program of public works
to refloat the economy. Unsurprisingly (given the low level of resource
utilization) it rebounds strongly, and in a similarly unsurprising way (given
that the renunciation of previous international commitments has closed any
means of foreign borrowing) in few years the economy overheats, inflation
threatens to rear its ugly head again and corruption and graft in a single
party state with no checks and balances are more and more prevalent. To extend the
party’s grasp of total power the staid, vaguely boring bureaucratic reason is
jettisoned and replaced by none other than its predecessor, romantic reason, as
any appearance of fixed rules and impersonal merit recognition is displaced by
party loyalty and belonging to the “right” race. You all know how it ends, when
the need to keep growing the economy can only be met by crazy rearmament, then
imperialist expansion in neighboring land, then total war and then near total
annihilation.
·
A
very big American country that has emerged from a series of fortunate
historical circumstances as the single hegemon of the world system, with unmatched
military power, at the beginning of the XXI century (the age of maximum
dominance of desiderative reason). By the end of the previous century the
system was giving clear signals of exhaustion: innovation was slowing (although
most people were not aware, as the media kept reporting more and taller tales
of breakthroughs and disruptions that somehow failed to materialize and
actually affect average people lives’), median income had been stagnant for
almost three decades, and even the frequent wars the country embarked on to
keep hidden the continuous flow of resources from the public sector back to (few
and well connected) private hands (“weaponized Keynesianism”) never seemed to
be won, or even to actually end. Although the middle class has seen its
fortunes dwindle, two classes have kept steadily improving: the super-rich
(more and more visible in an era where the only true progress happens in
communication technologies, thus making everybody’s lives more and more interconnected
and visible) and the urban poor. Along comes a clear sighted leader, that tells
everybody that everything will be OK. He’ll make the country great again
without having to change mental habits or old hierarchies. Their dominant
reason had not failed them, the motive it was not working any more was that a
powerful cabal of secret conspirators was thwarting the normal outcomes of the
democratic process, so if they kicked them out, everything would be good again.
The guy barely wins a contested election, but scrapes by to form a government
that in few months has achieved little, as checks and balances seem to preempt
his every move. In the face of sinking popularity (the ultimate fuel that keeps
him going, like most populist leaders) he makes more and more outrageous claims
that somehow leave his followers undaunted…
Of course, the final outcome of the
second case study has yet to be written. The orange one may be a blip, an
anomaly after which the system regains its footing and continues towards ever
more enlightened, fairer, more prosperous configurations (with or without
desiderative reason that, long as its reign has already been, will some day be
superseded, as all dominant reasons have been before). Or he may be the
harbinger of something more substantive, a true (and infrequent) revolution that
provides the final push to a crumbling system to force it to radically change,
setting in motion the (typically serious) disturbances that announce (and are
the prerequisite of) a change in dominant reason.
And what I’ve said of the American
president could as well be applied to the many populist leaders-to-be waiting
in the wings in so many other countries: Will Marine Le Pen end up inhabiting
the Élysée Palace? Beppe Grillo in the Quirinal? Is it legitimate to compare
the two, and both of them with the Donald? I’ll have more to say on the French
election (summarizing: I think not in the end, but wouldn’t be surprised if she
did), but I say the comparison is fully legitimate. What we see in all cases is
a bare majority forming thanks to the discontent with a situation where no
discontent is easily granted. Voters of populists are not the downtrodden of
the Earth. Most are employed in economies that, in historical terms, are wildly
successful and wealthy. But they all see the future with anguish and feel they
are not getting from society as much as they should. I don’t understand them as
saying that the rules are rigged against them, they seem to be fine with the
rules, at least with how they were interpreted and applied twenty or thirty
years ago (when their parents benefitted from them to achieve a standard of
living unheard of, and most likely unexpected even by themselves). What has
changed (it is important to note that in the populist imagination this is
always the case) is that suddenly those same rules that benefitted their parents
are benefitting somebody else, and not leaving enough for themselves. Those
free-riding immigrants, mostly (although in the middle-class white North
American the role the immigrant plays for the European is played by “blacks” and,
a late addition, “browns”). It is them who have to be purged from the social
body, put back in their place, so the current rationality works again for the
benefit of the native sons.
I think that expectation is
basically deluded. The generation that is nowadays beginning their professional
careers (from the kids entering college to the thirty-somethings that should be
settling in a job and being offered their first significant promotions, or
starting to generate benefits in their self-started businesses) is working longer
and longer hours for more meager rewards not because immigrants are siphoning
off all the riches we are collectively capable of creating (what in its face is
a pretty absurd notion), but because we have exhausted the possibilities of our
current dominant reason, which at this point is not able to make us
collectively produce more, or even just enough people to replenish the ranks of
consumers that modern economies demand to keep chugging along. We could close
our frontiers and prohibit trade as firmly and as tightly as we wanted, and our
economies would still be in the gutter (again, compared with those of our
parents, which still leaves ample room for them to be outstanding compared with
99,9% of human history) for lack of aggregate demand in the face of a dwindling
population AND lack of Total Factor Productivity growth in the face of lack of
innovation outside of Telecomms and video games. Want proof that getting rid of
the maligned “other” used as scapegoat by the populist leaders rarely, if ever,
works? The Germans kicked out the Jews really bad, and see where that took them
(I’m aware revisionist historians see their defeat at WWII as the ultimate
proof of the existence of that powerful cabal, which then successfully
whitewashed history to exonerate themselves… hogwash, the German economy had
proved to be inviable before the
Nuremberg laws, and certainly long before the start of the war). Expect nothing
different if Trump built his wall and repealed every single trade treaty (or
Marine did the same). The ills that have created populism in the first place
can not be cured with populism own recipe’s.
How could they be cured, then? That,
thoughtful reader (you have to be really
thoughtful to have made it up to this point!) would be the subject of another
post.
