Organizational justice

[This may be the first draft of a paper to be submitted to a conference in the Jesuit University Ignatianum in Krakow w the same title, or may be not, depending on how happy I am with the final result… it is, however, an issue I have been wanting to tackle for some time now but had postponed so far to deal with lighter matters]

Declaring that capitalism sucks and that the way we have chosen to organize our societies is fundamentally flawed and not conductive to human happiness and/ or flourishing is great fun and a source of moral validation (so much so that it is impossible not to perceive in such denunciations a whiff of suspicious self-righteousness that no truly moral worthy subject should stoop to), but at the end of the day everybody needs to earn a living, bring home the bacon, put some food in the table and a roof over his (and eventually his loved ones’) head and so on and so forth. Nowadays, to that end you normally don’t go out in the woods to hunt and fish and chop wood, but you join an existing organization, where you are assigned some tasks and perform them to the best of your ability. Or at least to the extent that would convince those in levels of responsibility that it is in their best interest to keep on employing you. Even if you choose the route of being an autonomous professional selling your skills in the open market there are a number of relationships you enter into (with the regulatory body that determines how your practice should be carried out, with subcontractors to deal with aspects of your daily routine you choose to outsource, with customers that -hopefully- end up paying your bills, with tax authorities you have to pay to so you can go on with your business, etc.)  that place you firmly within the context or an organization, even If it lacks a common juridical personality, as would be the case with the salaried employee within a company.

So the intermediate entity between the whole social system (capitalism, in all its soul-crushing evil, yadda, yadda, yadda…) and the individual is the organization. Even the unemployed belongs to one or multiple organizations: the agency that pays him the unemployment benefits (if there is such a safety net in his country), the newspaper where he seeks jobs or the provider that hosts the on line games he spends his days playing are all organizations he is more or less loosely attached to. The homeless person that seems to have severed every last social tie also belongs to some organization or other, from the parish or the social shelter where he sometimes sleeps to the mental health facilities where he may be eventually institutionalized. That means that, although very few can recognizably and significantly influence the whole social system, most can definitely have an impact in the organizations they belong to. Which in turn means that questions of justice, although they can be predicated of the whole social system, can only be put in practice in the institutions that mediate between such system and said individuals.

Interestingly, a lot has been written about the fairness and justice of the system as a whole: from Leviathan by Hobbes to A Theory of Justice by Rawls, including the Two Treatises on Government  by Locke, the Metaphysics of Morals by Kant, the Elements of the Philosophy of Right  by Hegel, On Liberty by Stuart Mill, the Communist Manifesto by Marx, the Responsibility Principle by Jonas, the Social System by Parsons, the Theory of Communicative Action by Habermas and Anarchy, State and Utopia  by Nozick. They all deal with society writ large: how it is ruled (or should be ruled), how decisions are made (or should be made), how property is held and transferred (or should be held and transferred -or not), what rights and duties people have as members of an all-encompassing group, what they owe to each other (the title of another book by Thomas Scanlon) and what they can demand each other. In the old Aristotelian term, they all find that justice required a certain political system, and that the definition of such system was the most meaningful contribution towards a more just world. But as to what happens when they step out of that all-encompassing group (the polity) and enter (more or less voluntarily, we will need to expand on that later on) in a smaller association, all have very little to say, apart from in general defending the possibility of individuals freely entering and leaving such association (but most authors seemed to have in mind political parties, or established churches rather than the more prosaic commercial companies that people in fact must join in a modern market-ruled economy).

Which is kind of a funny lapse, because, again, almost nobody is going to be able to single-handedly reform the whole judicial system, or seriously challenge democracy and the rule of law as organizing principles, or translate their denunciations of the free markets into more substantially redistributive institutions, but everybody has a certain level of control over how they perform their day to day work, the work they happen to do for, you know… an organization. So giving some direction of how to behave oneself in such environment would seem to be of more practical concern, and more influential, than thundering about the evils of a distributed decision making system (that happens to impersonally favor great wealth concentration at the expense of great effort and suffering from a poorly compensated majority that has to be kept in the dark about how stacked the system is against them) that has showed for some centuries to be quite impervious to any single actor’s decisions.

But before we proceed with trying to change such sorry state of affairs, I’ll have something to say about that wider critique that so many intellectuals have luxuriated in so frequently until now. To avoid being labelled a conformist (not that I would care) I’ll clarify that I don’t consider such critique lacking justification or, more pointedly, merit. I myself have dwelled at length in the shortcomings of our current system (shortcomings that don’t entirely compensate for the more abundant ones exhibited by any alternative system ever actually attempted: Two views of the system), and have even tried my hand at sketching how an better system may look like (both here: What is Anarcho Traditionalism and here: What a sunny future for humanity looks like ). I take my hat off and raise my glass to all the dreamers, the purveyors of alternative social arrangements, the utopians and the commune-founding nonconformists (between which I’ve counted myself more than once). Let’s just admit they have not been historically very successful in hastening the dawn of Heaven on Earth or, absent that, the development of a society a iota more fair and just than our current one. And what I portend to do is to hasten such a dawn (of the more just society, I leave Heaven on Earth to the Almighty) by analyzing not how everybody should behave as a member of society, and how such vast construct should be arranged (something I’m in no position to influence whatsoever, as weren’t Hobbes, Locke, Kant, Hegel, Mill, Marx, Jonas, Parsons, Habermas, Rawls or Nozick, each in his own time), but how we should act within the organizations that actually employ us, and how such smaller units should be arranged.

In a very Socratic way, if we intend to identify the rules for creating more just organizations we will need to start defining what justice is. The most common definition around is “giving each one his due” or “giving each one what corresponds to him”, which doesn’t get us that much closer, as we then have to inquire into what is due to each member of the organization, or what corresponds to each one, and we may to our dismay find that the answer to both is “what justice dictate they should receive”. So if we want to break from this circular definition we have two main alternatives:

·         Define justice as consisting in giving to each as they deserve, that is, what they have earned according to some previously agreed rules

·         Or define justice as giving to each as they require, that is, ensure everybody’s needs are equally tended for

Both are fraught with difficulties: determining what every member of the organization contributes to the common good (what he has earned, and thus what he in return deserves) is famously tricky (if I’m the one apportioning the rewards, I’ll likely have a strong incentive to value my own contribution and that of those close to me as more substantial than anybody else’s… anybody else would likely have a different view of such valuation, and thus of the justice of the resulting distribution); determining what each one requires independently of merit or contribution would incentivize free riding and asocial behaviors (as exemplified by the communist motto “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need” that unsurprisingly fostered a society where everybody seemed to have a lot of the latter and very little of the former).

It has to be noted that the rules we are attempting to pin down have to do with distributive justice: within the framework we are dealing with, they would be the rules pertaining how to assign the benefits the organization provides. They have less to say regarding who is entitled to give orders, what are the limits of such orders (if they are indeed somehow limited) and how much exertion those expected to obey them should apply in carrying them out. We will have a bit more to say about that kind of rules (which we could group under the header of procedural justice), but let’s first explore a bit more how the aforementioned benefits are apportioned.

One approach to determining as fairly as possible the benefits each member of the organization “deserves” is to have an impersonal mechanism setting them. If any single person could decide with complete freedom what each member, including himself, enjoys of the common product it is difficult to avoid the impression that he will have a strong incentive to overcompensate himself and those close to him (the level of “closeness” can depend on a number of factors, like family ties or similar tastes or similar personality traits or even gender or race that are generally considered germane to “just desert”, and thus should not be taken into consideration if a just distribution of rewards is to be achieved). But if there are “external”, “objective” rules that he has to apply to decide how much of such common product he gives to each member of the organization we think that there is less opportunity for “unfair” or “unjust” distributions; we tend to assume that if the rules are impersonal and “objective” enough they should produce an equitable, unobjectionable distribution. That, of course, is absolutely false: take an impersonal rule like “give 100% of the organization’s income to the tallest employee” (or the fattest, oldest, youngest, of darkest complexion, of lightest complexion, whatever) or “distribute the organization’s income proportionally to the number of days between each employees birth date and the 23^rd of June of 2003”. Such rules are surely as objective as you may dream, but the distribution that may result from their application won’t be “fair” or “just” by any standard measure, and will likely result in people leaving the organization in droves, except for those favored by them (that in most cases won’t be especially deserving, or able to contribute in an especially significant way, thus causing the quick demise of the organization for lack of adequate talent).

You may suspect I have chosen some outrageously irrational samples of “objective” rules to make some point, and you would be entirely right. The lesson I want my readers to take home is this: “impersonal” rules, with a patina of objectivity around them, do not guarantee a fairer, more just outcome than just giving full discretionality to a member (or reduced group of members) of the organization to decide about how the benefits it produces should be distributed. However, most theoreticians of the matter seem to have concluded (not recently, the argument started to take shape about 300 years ago) that there is one particular set of objective rules that almost magically guarantee the fairest, most just arrangement that can be conceived. A magical set of rules that allow us to forget about the fairness of the organizational arrangements we enter into, as its application ensures we all get the best deal we could dream of. What extraordinary set of rules are those? I’ll defer to a highly regarded academic text, the eighteenth edition of Economics by Samuelson & Nordhaus, page 288:

A general-equilibrium market system will display allocative efficiency when there is perfect competition, with well-informed producers and consumers and no external effects. In such a system, each good’s price is equal to its marginal costs and each factor’s price is equal to the value of its marginal product. When each producer maximizes profits and each consumer maximizes utility, the economy as a whole is efficient. No one can be made better off without making someone else worse off…

… The basic point to see is that, because prices serve as signals of economic scarcity for producers and social utility for consumers, a competitive price mechanism allows the best mix of goods and services to be produced from a society’s resources and technology.

We could formulate what I propose to call “the Economist rule” as follows: “give to each member of the organization as much as he contributes at the margin (as much as he adds value to each good or service the organization sells)”. That is indeed “how the real world works”: the salary of every employee (or the fee every independent professional can command) determined by the market in proportion to what the consumers are willing to pay for what said employee does to whatever it is his company (or himself directly) sells. Sounds very rational, objective, impersonal and thus fair, doesn’t it? Only it is essentially bunk, and it has as much to do with how salaries are really determined in a company as the number of angels that can fit on a pin’s head has to do with the atomic weight of iron…

Let us quickly review a number of problems of the definition of “an efficient general equilibrium market-system” as defined by Samuelson and Nordhaus (and widely accepted by most economists today):

·         There isn’t anything like “perfect competition” in most markets, starting with the labor market (where the number of weekly, monthly and yearly hours is capped by law; the state taxes those hours differently depending on the industry and legal status of the worker; there are in some jurisdictions floors to how much can be offered per unit of work -minimum wage-; there are vast asymmetries in negotiating power between the parts, even in the face of collective bargaining from the workers, and information about salaries in other industries or in other firms within the same industry is typically very difficult to come by) and including the energy market, the travel market, the manufactured goods market, the health market, the residential building market, the personal (domestic) services market, the agricultural market and the financial market, at a minimum to try to reduce externalities and protect consumers and the environment  

·         Neither producers nor consumers are in any meaningful sense “well-informed”. Even in these times of apparently easy access to “all of humanity’s knowledge”, when any conceivable piece of information is “just a click away”, you would be surprised by how little executives know about what their customers value, what they workers demand, what their machines can realistically produce and what their productive processes yield

·         A direct consequence of the above is that the much vaunted coincidence of marginal costs with marginal prices that sets the overall production level for each firm is but a mirage. To begin with, it presupposes a production function where the costs slope upwards (the cost of producing an additional unit grows with every additional unit produced) and a consumption function where the utility (and thus what the consumers are willing to pay) slopes downward (as they derive less satisfaction from every additional unit consumed), which is theoretically pleasant to contemplate, but not that frequent in real life. In real life not only production and consumption functions can slope in whatever direction (depending on demand elasticity and the amount of fixed vs variable costs) but are more discrete than continuous, so they may not even intersect in any meaningful sense (so firms necessarily produce either less or more than what the public is willing to consume at the price they ask for, and there is no “natural” way to adjust prices to make demand and supply coincide, having to resort to rationing, queuing, perpetual inventories or semi-permanent overcapacity)

·         Although I can grant that companies (or suppliers in general) know what maximizing benefits consists in (benefits are measured in money, and although money can get pretty metaphysical, i.e. how much are Apple’s benefit really worth, if it finds no attractive investment to park them into and all it can do is sit on top of them as a growing and useless pile of cash?, at least everybody can agree that if firm A earns more money than firm B in the same amount of time, it is generating more benefits) I firmly believe that there is no such thing as “maximizing utility” for consumers. What the f@%k is utility? How does it compare between different people? And for the same person between different moments in time? I know, I know the standard answer of economists: “revealed preferences”, so utility is exactly and precisely measured by what the people is willing to pay for each unit of satisfaction. Rather than go in a furious rant that would take me far away from the original goal of this post, I’ll just point that such argument is rather circular, and using the fact of people paying a certain price for something as a justification that such price is the right measure of the value of such something is the very definition of question begging, and introduces in the explanandum the very explanans that we are trying to define.

In summary, if there is no such thing as “perfect competition”, no such thing as “well-informed” producers and consumers and no such thing as meaningful “utility maximization” through the information provided  by prices, can we say with a straight face that the “market mechanism” ensures a just and fair distribution of the companies’ rewards? No, we definitely can not. Which means we can not abdicate our responsibility of fairly rewarding our fellow employees by discharging the decision on how much to pay them to the market, assuming that if we pay them a “market salary” we are doing good and all is well. Because such “market salary” is an empty ideological construct (“ideological” in the worst, most Marxist sense of the word: a deliberate attempt made by those that benefit the most from the current system to justify it and thus better impose it on the many disadvantaged by it). Nothing new here, as I’ve already developed most of my objections to the supposed application of economic logic to real life here: Shortcomings of economic "science" and here: Shortcoming II (some drollery)

So we are back at square one: we quickly dismissed the possibility of a distributive justice based on needs, as it compromises the viability of the organizations that adopt it by attracting and rewarding free-riders and moochers. We have just dismissed the possibility of a distributive justice based on desert, as the supposedly objective criteria used to determine the amount of desert of each individual is highly suspect, and ends up leading to tremendously well paid top executives profiting handsomely from the squalor and exploitation of the majority of the workforce.

What I would suggest is that we better dismiss distributive justice altogether, and confine it to a wider organization (the whole state, which uses its power of taxation to achieve a more just distribution of the whole social product). For smaller, economic organizations (firms and companies) I would argue that it is procedural justice the one that we must be concerned about, and the one that defines if they are fair to its members or not. And to define the “right” sort of procedural justice and how it should be understood I propose to look not at the classical economists and utilitarians (Hume, Smith, Mill), but to a figure that only recently has been vindicated as having something relevant to say about organizations. None other than the German philosopher Immanuel Kant.

Which will require an additional post, as this is already too long (well, this looked since the beginning like a to part installment, I’m sure you already saw this coming)…

Are you terrified yet?

After the third terror attack in England in so many months (one in Manchester, two in London) it behooves us to consider if we are pivoting to a true clash of civilizations, in Huntington’s sense, and if the world we inhabit is more dangerous, or more risky, than the one we grew up into (let’s say, between 1970 and 2010 or, if we want to align the focus of our analysis with the great tectonic shifts of history, between 1989 -the year of the fall of the Berlin wall and the end of the Cold War- and 2001 -the year of the attacks that felled the twin towers in New York on Sep-11 which in turn triggered the subsequent invasion of Iraq in 2003).

But before we discuss the issue at hand, let me give a little background of my upbringing, as it has surely colored my understanding of this “terrorism” thing. I grew up in Madrid, in the 70’s. A little separatist group had been recently established vying for the political independence of a small corner of the country, the Basque region (that group was the only recently disbanded ETA, whose two first murders happened in 1968, although there is an apocryphal attribution of the killing of a 22 month old girl in 1960, most historians today think they were not the culprits of that one). In the second half of the decade they were killing between 60 and 80 people a year, more than one per week: mostly policemen and soldiers (members of the “occupation army” both in the Basque provinces and in the capital) but also businessmen who didn’t pay the “revolutionary tax”, bus drivers, teachers, owners of bars and restaurants, patrons and simple passers-by gunned down or blown away just for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Again, rare was the week that didn’t bring the news of another attack, or another victim. Some were, as mentioned, members of the “state security forces” in the terrorists parlance (as if such category were not just another kind of salaried worker, directly providing a much needed service for the well-being of most), but unavoidably many of them were not.

Later, well in the 80’s the band would lose its initial “legitimacy” (in the eyes of a part of their populations of origin, who still saw them as freedom fighters again Franco’s dictatorship, many years after such dictatorship had been replaced by a democratic government) by perpetrating ever more savage acts, bombing apartment blocks and public places were scores of women and children would be killed (like a shopping mall in Barcelona in 1987, causing 21 deaths, or the blowing of an apartment building housing policemen in Saragossa in 1987 also, resulting in 11 deaths, or in Vic in 1991, with 9 dead).

All that may sound like ancient history, like the wars of the Greeks and the Persians: some historians tell you who were the good boys, and who were not so good. All equally removed from us, burdened with concerns and preoccupations very different from ours. Until it all becomes awfully close and clear. I remember very vividly the morning of the 14^th of July 1986, as a car bomb exploded just three blocks away from my house, as a bus transporting policemen passed, killing 12 of them and wounding scores of bystanders. The bomb went off besides the entrance of the tube station I sometimes used to go to school, and although I wasn’t taking it that particular day, it felt near enough to make it uncomfortably real. And it was not just my country. 

On some summers we would go to Ireland to practice English, and learn of the state of slow motion civil war up North (Bobby Sands was already in jail, he would die in prison in 1981, after a hunger strike) and the renewed activity of the IRA, both in Northern Ireland and in London. In Germany we heard of the RAF (Fraction of the Red Army) led by Ulrike Meinhof (suspiciously found dead in her cell in May 1976, she apparently hanged herself with a towel, something I propose my most venturesome readers to attempt, just to realize how difficult it would be) and Andreas Baader (even more suspiciously found dead, also in his cell, within a high security prison complex, with a difficult to explain shot in the head in October next year). In Italy the “red brigades” were conducting a terror campaign that culminated with the kidnapping and killing of the Christian Democracy leader Aldo Moro in 1978 (I personally remember with great clarity the images in the news -still in black and white back then- of the just found corpse of the politician). In most of Latin America those were also the “lead years” that would end in the rise of more or less sinister military dictatorships.

So I have an intimate, first person experience of what it is to live in a society besieged by terrorism, where terror attacks are not an exception or something that every now and then seem to come out of the blue, to be quickly forgotten, but part and parcel of everyday life. Where you know some of your countrymen are actively dedicated to the overthrowing of the (more or less) legitimate form of government. You wake up in the morning and go about your life (go to school, to the Uni, to work, buy groceries, visit a friend, go to a movie) knowing that a certain number of those you cross paths with are devoting all of their waking energy to plot for mayhem and destruction. In “secret locations” they store weaponry (machine guns, pistols, revolvers, explosives, pressure cookers, nuts and bolts, ignition switches, catapults, truncheons, balaclavas, knifes… their arsenal, luridly shown when arrested, always has some shockingly outdated, incongruous materials), they train in their use, they follow political leaders, members of government, industrialists, famous journalists or just look for busy places where they can cause the maximum carnage. And as they more or less successfully carry on their grim trade and the list of casualties grow by the day you become number and number to a certain amount of pieties: the rule of law, presumption of innocence, habeas corpus, the unconditional evil of torturing a prisoner to attempt to extract some information…

Indeed, I recall that being (as it still is nowadays) the absolutely predictable reaction of a growing segment of the population: harsher punishment for terrorist; Bring back the death penalty! Mix them with common criminals, so they are regularly beaten, and raped! (in the mind of a certain segment of the public, “normal” incarceration is supposed to be a Holiday spa, certainly not much of a punishment for such grisly acts as terrorists have committed. And of course, not only the perpetrators, but their accomplices must be similarly prosecuted. And not only current accomplices, but potential ones. To prevent their hateful ideology from propagating, freedom of the press (and of association) can and should be curtailed. You don’t want to provide the killers with a bullhorn and allow them to form a political party so they can better spew their credo of violence and aggression against innocent people! In my own country, the “German solution” (difficult not to reach the conclusion than the country’s security forces had something to do with the “suicide” of the Baader-Meinhof leaders) was almost universally praised.

Now we know that some countries went along those lines further than others. Spain dabbled in “state terrorism”, and a “counterterrorist” group was founded (GAL, the not terribly imaginative acronym for “Counterterrorism Liberation Group”) with funds and material support from what were then called the “states’ sewers”. Active between 1984 and 1987, they killed a number of militants accused of belonging to ETA or their political arm (HB), but also up to 10 people with no relationship whatsoever with the band. They contributed to the end of what was known as the “French sanctuary” (where people accused of terrorism in Spain, a democracy on the verge of joining the EU, could roam absolutely unimpeded) but also helped a significant segment of the public opinion in the Basque provinces stay resolutely in favor of the terrorists’ activity (presented as a legitimate defense from an equally bloodthirsty national state that had no qualms to resort to similarly indiscriminate violence) for many years. However, due in part to their sheer bumbling incompetence (the “GAL affair” would be used against the then-governing socialist party once the many links between them and the government became public, and the Home Secretary that probably oversaw their creation ended up serving time in jail) they did not irreversibly degrade the still very recent democratic institutions of the country, and the final disappearance of ETA was due to the vast majority of the population turning against their methods, rather than the “military defeat” that many dreamed of in their worse days. Although militarily defeated they were, with their commandos being regularly dismantled by the police and a growing number of members behind bars claiming for a “negotiated agreement” being one of the factors that undoubtedly accelerated their demise.

In a certain sense, that’s the better outcome that could be expected. European democracies were never really threatened by left-wing radicals in the late 70’s (we now know that they had some modest material support from the Soviet Union, but not so much between their own citizenry to ever have a realistic shot at seizing power, or just triggering a popular response that would seriously destabilize democratic governments), and even the separatist movements (IRA and ETA) that continued into the 80’s and 90’s never had much of a chance, no matter how serious the grievances against the local populations from which they drew their support truly were. 

Thus, the societies they tried to terrorize, just by staying resolutely democratic and not deferring to those between them that claimed for more “extraordinary powers” to better combat the scourge of terrorism, defeated them at the end of the day. But not all the countries were so lucky: in Latin America, as I mentioned, democracies were indeed overturned (in Chile, Argentina, Brazil, Peru, Guatemala, El Salvador…) and replaced by military rule, that in most cases ended being worse for the majority of the population than the terrorists ever were, and most have still not fully recovered from the cronyism, corruption and loss of civic spirit that totalitarian rule entails. Not only that, but they are probably much less equal societies than they were back then, with solidarity between elites and the majority of the population significantly eroded by the former’s support to military regimes, and the latter’s bearing the brunt of the repression and abuses of said regimes. I’m not saying that terrorism is the only explanation for the rise of the harvest of strongmen and military juntas that seized power in the region in the 70’s and 80’s (a wide number of additional reasons explain that, including the interference of USA’s State Department and the more or less open support of the CIA), but ti definitely had an oversize role in such developments.

Talking about myself, I can say that now (with Basque separatists’ terrorism all but extinct for a decade, although the latest terrorist attack in Spanish soil was pretty spectacular: on March 11^th 2004 ten explosions in trains at peak hour would cause the death of 192 people and injured more than 2,000) I oppose the recourse to “extraordinary means” to combat violence as much as I did back then, when my political philosophy was forming, and basically consisted in being against what the majority of my countrymen would be for (always the contrarian). Always against the death penalty (the state has no business taking any of his citizen’s lives, no matter what unspeakable evil they may have perpetrated). Always against limits to a free press (heck, if we allow “The Economic Approach to Human Behavior” by Gary Becker to be widely discussed and sold, I can’t see why we shouldn’t do the same with “Mein Kampf”, “Das Kapital”, or any similarly demented manifesto from whatever half-addled visionary psychopath).  Let us not forget I’m a Kantian, so in particular always against torture, which is for me a line in the sand beyond which I do not think it permissible to go ever (not even in a “ticking bomb” scenario, and furthermore I think the plausibility of those scenarios is mostly hogwash). A society that grants certain “extraordinary powers” to its government so it can more effectively provide security and “fight terrorism” may be in for an ugly shock, when the behavior of the government ends up being as immoral as that of the baddies it had to purportedly fight.

But, as opposed to today’s dominant narrative, I don’t think such opposition aligns me instead with your average wishy-washy liberal (in the American sense): I’m not especially fond of a number of progressive shibboleths, from identity politics to representative democracy itself (although I don’t know of any historical example of single party polity that was supportive enough of a free press to win my admiration), and I believe in a number of tenets (from the moral superiority of what, from lack of a better term, we may call the Western tradition to the existence of biological differences between races and sexes, plus a certain irrational allegiance to heteronomous norms for organizing collective existence that have been definitely out of fashion for at least a couple of centuries) that put me waaaaay beyond the pale for your average run-of-the-mill left-leaning enlightened citizen. However, as usual in this blog, I don’t think my own highly idiosyncratic thoughts and opinions are as interesting for my readers as a wider analysis of why the majority think as it does. So rather than discuss what I personally think about the terrorist threat (that can be summarized as: it exists, it is blown out of all proportion by a frenzied media, as it is much less serious than it was four decades ago, and it is best combatted with good police and an exquisite application of the rule of law) I want to devote the remainder of this post to consider why it gets so much attention and what is the most rational attitude towards it (towards the attention, that is, not towards terrorism itself: it goes without saying that the only rational attitude towards terrorism is of unqualified condemnation -without forgetting that one man’s terrorism is another man’s dignified struggle for liberation and recognition, see Menachem Begin and Hotel King David bombing).

But first, to put things in perspective, let’s remember a couple facts: the number of people who have died in terrorist attacks in the whole wide world in the last years hovers between ten thousand and forty thousand:

  

That looks pretty bad, doesn’t it? But if we decompose the figures a bit, we quickly see that most of those victims, sad and heartbreaking as they are, are very much concentrated in a few trouble spots, which (and I know I’m being admittedly rude and insensitive here) we could summarize as “Muslims killing one another”. The majority of casualties of terrorist attacks, as publicized as disasters like the Bataclan shootings, the Lockerbie bombing or Madrid train explosions are, com from bombings and shooting of Shia Muslims at the hands of Sunni ones (and a considerably lower amount of the opposite). So much so that some newspaper have already noticed that while journalist in the West routinely look for the “human interest” angle of the victims of the (comparatively few) attacks in the West, they give at most a statistical summary of the much more violent carnage relentlessly unfolding in the rest of the world (Terror attacks in the West and elsewhere ). Now I don’t want to convey the impression that not all acts of terror are similarly tragic, or that there are different classes of victims, some more deserving our sympathy and commiseration than others, but as I want to center my subsequent analysis on Western media and Western society reactions, I’ll zoom in the number of victims in Europe and the US, namely:

 

So in the worst year (1988: 270 people died over Lockerbie and about 100 in Spain due to a single terrorist group, the already discussed ETA) a bit more than 400 Europeans died in terror attacks. Within a population of about 250 million.

What about the USA? For all practical purposes the USA has suffered a single, very traumatic big attack (Sep 11^th) and then a drip of smaller ones (the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah federal building in Oklahoma City in 1995 being the most notorious, and deadliest, of them):

So on a typical year terrorism, that modern scourge, that deadly plague, that most awful threat of our times, is likely to kill a couple hundreds Europeans and a couple dozens North Americans. Some plague! Just to put it in perspective, in 2016 deaths directly attributable to tobacco use reached 7 million worldwide, and slightly less than half a million in the USA. Deaths in car crashes amounted to 1.25 million worldwide, almost 35,000 in the USA.

And of course, the number of fatalities in car accidents in the USA is actually below that of people killed using a gun:

Yup, I know the source is the Communist News Network, not a reputable source like Taki or Breitbart (just kiddin’ folks) but the numbers add up with what I’ve been researching in other sources. And the majority of those deaths (about two thirds) are suicides anyway. And the statistics do not reflect the hundreds of thousands of acts of violence prevented by heroic and well-trained armed citizens protected by their sacrosanct right to keep and bear arms, enshrined in the 2^nd amendment. Yadda, yadda, yadda, my point is, a society inured to that level of violent death (self-inflicted or otherwise) has no rationale for taking every sort of constitutionally dubious measure (special tribunals, state-sanctioned “enhanced interrogation” methods, foreign detention sites with no judicial supervision, discretionary powers to snoop into the communications of ordinary citizens with no explicit warrant, and on and on and on…) because some weirdo or other decides every few months to kill one or two of his countrymen whilst shouting “Allahu Akbar” (instead of shouting “gimme your wallet” or the plain ol’ “you talkin’ to me?”).

So back to my original question: if you live in Europe, or the USA (or Australia, or Japan, or Korea, or Canada) these are still pretty peaceful times compared with historical standards, and your chances of dying or being hurt in a terrorist attack are as slim as those of being struck by an actual, honest-to-God lightning, and much, much lower than being involved in a car accident or contracting a cardiorespiratory disease due to second-hand smoke. Just to clarify, things are much grimmer if you live in Iraq, Afghanistan or South Sudan, but that’s not what we are talking about here. I do not read Iraqi, Afghan or Sudanese newspaper, but I do read European and American ones, and rare is the day when terrorism is not in them. Months after any substantial attack we are still discussing them, obsessing about them, analyzing how the perpetrators radicalized, who they talked to, what they were like, what they posted in social media and what signals if any they did give of their growing alienation.

And I think that is the key to the fascination of the media with terrorists (or, more precisely, with terrorists who strike in our midst, as they really couldn’t care less about the ones that choose to blow themselves up in Helmand or Lahore): they are the perfect example of the “other one” in our midst that most substantially reject our value system. As a brief aside, what is that value system made of? A rule for assigning social precedence (who gives orders and who has to obey), a set of socially sanctioned desires (what is it considered legitimate to strive for) and, most conspicuously, what a life well lived consists in. The trifecta of dominant reason. Which is the real key of the attention we lavish on those that reject the three tenets wholesale: painting them as the most evil, most disturbed, most despicable and most deserving of scorn (it is interesting to note how frequently they are depicted as “losers”… well in a sense they are, and that’s part of the reason they chose not to participate in the common criteria for assigning positions in the social hierarchy) serves the purpose of increasing the social cohesion, by emphasizing the worst outcomes of stepping out of the majority’s consensus of what serves as an intelligible reason for action (those conforming to the dominant, desiderative one).

Indeed, a crumbling dominant reason that is questioned (or openly rejected) by a growing percentage of the population can not expect to obtain new allegiances through positive messaging: that is what being exhausted entails, it has stopped efficiently convincing the newer generations of its validity, and can only resort to pointing out how much worse any imaginable alternative is. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying the terrorists’ credo is a valid, viable, imaginable alternative (I have not studied whatever form of reason was dominant in Xth century Arabia, but I doubt it can function to instill XXIst century globalized society with a functioning set of shared values), I’m saying we find it endlessly highlighted in the news, in the press, on TV, in memes and FB posts and incendiary podcasts because a number of actors see it as a useful foil (“don’t like desiderative reason? Look how much worse the alternative looks like”) with which to prevent further social degradation. And again, it’s not that I think preventing social degradation is an unworthy goal. I’m all against social degradation, but presenting a boogie man, a red herring and crying wolf all in one is not going to do the work.

It is not going to do the work because when a dominant reason loses its grip on the collective imagination the only way to revive the fortunes of the suddenly rudderless group that it previously helped to coordinate is to replace it with a new one. As far as I’ve been able to see, no dominant reason ever was revived by the oversized depiction of an external threat. Rather, such strategy has frequently backfired and accelerated the demise of the old set of values, and their replacement by a new one. Like Burke fulminating the incoming Romantic Reason by associating it with the excesses of the Terror phase of the French Revolution (did Burke, and many like him, manage to sustain Economic Reason? Nope, Shelley and Byron and Wordsworth were in the end more influential than Condorcet and Rousseau and Voltaire in overcoming the venerable dominant reason he so much cherished, but overcome it they did, and thus Romantic reason ended reigning supreme in England as much as in the Continent). Or like Heidegger fulminating against bureaucratic reason in the name of god ol’ romantic one (well, in his home country romantic reason did experience a comeback, and a whole world war was needed to unseat it again), or Adorno, Benjamin and Horkheimer fulminating against the then rising desiderative reason (from their bureaucratized perspective, it was so much better in their eyes to have a cadre of humane, well-trained, cultivated public servants organizing society and deciding on the social hierarchy, rather than the messy business of leaving it to the market!).  

So don’t get too fixated on the barrage of news of atrocities in the great Western capitals (atrocities that can, and should, be stopped by patient police work, not by the granting of “extraordinary powers” to governments too prone to abuse them). Whatever hodgepodge of half-baked value system comprising legitimate desires, criteria for social precedence and what a life well-lived looks like as are proposed by people that try to advance them by indiscriminately blowing people up will not prevail, I have little doubt about that. But neither will our own current set, if only because it has shown itself incapable of physically reproducing those that should embody it. Decrying and denouncing and belittling the former will do little to bolster the latter. Accelerating the advent of self-driving cars, and thus reducing the number of accidents, on the other hand, seems like a very worthy endeavor...

About that second (or is it third) Industrial Revolution

I’ve been reviewing some of Peter Thiel’s musings about the deceleration of Technological progress, something that any regular reader of this blog knows I mostly agree with. From the most famous 2011 National Review article “The end of the future”: The end of the Future to this pretty perceptive take on the implications for VC on our lack of optimism and belief in a determinate future contained in the class notes of the course he imparted in Stanford in 2012: Thiel's class. Mr. Thiel is obviously a very perceptive observer, and I find it doubly deserving of praise that he has managed to avoid the (in my humble opinion entirely unfounded) techno-optimism that permeates so thoroughly his milieu (the Silicon Valley based investors and entrepreneurs between whom he makes his living), regardless of the “exotic” policy choices he has made of late.

Or may be both (the savviness about how to invest money in a modern, technologically stagnant economy and the support for an “unconventional” candidate in politics) are intimately related, as precisely because he has such insight in the workings of the system he realizes the dangers of stagnation, the likelihood of collapse derived from unfulfilled promises to a growing majority that is growing restless with the perceived inequality and underlying unfairness of how things are organized, and is thus willing to cast his lot with the person less likely to keep the status quo going, unpredictable as the outcome of such bet may be. However, what the review of such copious notes (with which again, and uncharacteristically, I found much to agree) has kept me thinking about is the extent to which the current consensus about how the future may look like is wrong, and how a more sober assessment of where we are headed to may look like.

 Now, when we talk about the “current consensus” we have to take such artificial construct with a pinch of salt, as there is a growing number of academics and journalists on whom it is (slowly and painfully) dawning that the super-duper revolutionary changes that are upon us may be a bit oversold, that there may be a bit more hype than reality in the maelstrom of technological wonders that the likes of Thomas Friedman keep describing in the editorial pages of the NYT. Not only Robert Gordon (whom I’ve drawn extensively from) has tried to show that the pace of innovation has measurably slowed in the last decades, but even more run-of-the-mill journalists are letting some doubts about the incoming automation revolution (see, for example, Derek Thompson in the latest number of “the Atlantic”: So where are all those robots?). However, I still think the vast majority of public opinion lives in a La la land in which innovation is still happening at a breakneck speed, and we are on the cusp of the “greatest changes in how humans live in the whole history of our species”, a vacuous assertion typically backed by some of the following:

·         Automation and artificial intelligence pose an imminent threat to the livelihoods of a third of the workforce (lawyers, physicians, accountants, truck drivers, retail clerks, inventory managers, and almost any conceivable manufacturing-related occupation are widely considered jobs that may be replaced and made redundant by “robots” in the next five years, ten tops)

·         Autonomous electric vehicles are all you will see on the roads five years from now (sounds far-fetched? I’m I straw manning here? Not at all, according to John Zimmer, not surprisingly CEO of Lyft: Third transportation revolution is upon us already in 2025 private car ownership will have all but disappeared from major US cities)

·         Renewable, clean energies will replace all coal, gas and nuclear power stations within the next decade

·         Advances in medicine enabled by the “decoding” of the human genome will “defeat death” and make us live forever (side rant: one can not but wonder if the people that give voice to such pabulum thinks that “us” is just the journalist and his interviewee -who is the one making a comfy living out of other people’s credulity, usually thanks to the media platform provided by the gullible reporter- or includes somebody else, up to the whole of humanity, like Aubrey de Grey seems to imply with his frequent quote that “age-related diseases account for one hundred thousand deaths a day, that’s the cost of every single day of delay in defeating death” - by giving him more money for research, one surmises)

·         Between now and 2045 (the stated date of the singularity, according to Ray Kurzweil) the continued improvements in hardware will make the apparition of a “superintelligence” (general purpose and well beyond human capabilities in any cognitive field) all but inevitable. Once that superintelligence becomes sentient, all bets are off about what may become of us, old and clunky chunks of meat sadly unable to compare with such clever contraption

·         If genetic tinkering doesn’t do the trick, the massive use of nanobots to replace our aging cells and remove damaged tissue will surely vastly improve our life expectancy. If separating the good cells from the bad ones proves to be too daunting a task, there are bazillions of things the incoming nanotechnology revolution will potentially do for us (building materials that reconfigure themselves to adapt to the stress they are subjected to, intelligent fabrics that reflect the climatic conditions or just our mood and fancy, cleaning sites after nuclear accidents… ooops, sorry, no nuclear accidents in our future, as we will be getting all our energy from wind and sun in a few years)

·         And of course, we have the Internet of Things, truly revolutionary in its implications (or has that one already been exposed as a commercial gimmick that consultants use to convince their naïve clients so they part from their hard-earned money?)

·         Immersive, seamless Virtual Reality will revolutionize entertainment, bringing an end to every form of leisure humanity has known until know as people retreat more and more within the harmless artificial paradises enabled by the new technology (well, given all the work will be done by robots, it’s all well and good we will at least have something to keep the masses entertained)

·         What to say about space travel and exploration? Permanent base on the moon? Human colony on Mars? Laser-on-lightsails powered nanoprobes on their way to the closest star? Guys, is the future we are talking about! Why be shy? All of them, and then some, in the coming decade!

What can I say? Other than, as I’ve indeed say before, none of them are going to happen. Not for sure in the “immediate future” (between now and 2027, sorry Mr. Zimmer). Most likely not between now and 2037 either, a collapsing social system in which a growing majority is “proletarianized” (again, as I do not tire to remind my readers, in a Toynbeean, not Marxian sense) and thus disengaged from the dominating values of the elites is less and less able to innovate, and one of its defining features is that everything end up costing more than originally envisioned. I do not entirely deny that some of those marvels may end up materializing in 20-50 years (my bet for most likely ones are autonomous cars, which will probably be electric and communal -but never all of them, cars are too much of an status symbol to be so easily forsworn by plutocrats; followed by overwhelmingly wind- and solar-based energy somewhere around 2040).

Am I an “stagnationist”, then? Do I think that the future will look more or less like the past, as the vast majority of people have thought for the vast majority of human history? Far from it. Given how good we have it (in our corner of the world, sure, but such corner now encompasses more than a third of humanity), being a stagnationist would be a joy and a source of comfort. This is the deal: societies are essentially unstable (I’ll get to why in a moment), so when they are not “advancing”, developing its internal strengths, growing and evolving they don’t just stay put in whatever level of civilizational achievement they have reached. They start to decompose, degenerate, rot from the core and disintegrate. It can be a slow process, drawn out during centuries (like the paradigmatic case of the Roman empire, and may be the Ottoman empire too) or they can pretty dramatically go out with a bang (like those pre-Columbine Mexican societies whose cities we can still admire, abandoned in an unexplained bout of fury and despair). In the growth phase we tend to pay attention to a couple of forces: art and technology, as they help us understand the world view of their inhabitants: what scenes did they paint? What aspects of man did they enhance and pay more attention to in their sculptures? About what circumstances did they write? And of course how did they cultivate their fields? How did they procure clean water? How did they dispose of their refuse? How did they weave their clothes? A lot of ink has been spilled, and a lot of thought devoted to how those two currents (arts and technologies) relate to each other, how one explains more or less of the other and how advances in one modify or open new fields of exploration in the other. But what is less frequently acknowledged is that in the second phase of every civilization’s lifecycle (the descending one) those two forces become secondary to another one: social relations.

You may rightfully argue that “social relations” is a catch-all term that can easily incorporate under its broad mantle both the two previously mentioned forces (art and technology) as well as many, even more disparate, others: economic relations are definitely social in nature, the use of military force may be construed as an extreme form of social relation, and so on and so forth. So let me explain what I mean. What I detect in most writers that have stubbornly bought the canard of accelerating technological advances in the face of (equally stubborn) productivity and median income statistics that show that there is no acceleration at all, but rather a day by day more marked deceleration is a fixation in technology, and in a particular type of technology at that: Google has developed a program that can defeat the best human go player, and go is the most complex board game devised by humans (I don’t have the faintest idea of the rules of go, so I’m taking that oft-cited assertion at face value); Amazon can deliver to your doorstep any book ever written or any tchotchke you can dream of a few hours after you know of its existence for the first time; You iPhone can alert you that an appointment on the other side of town is coming, and call an Uber car for you to get there without you as much as lifting a finger… So everything is up for grabs, and the future will be even more full of such wonders because that particular type of technology has the potential to completely upend how society works.

And what I’m trying to say is that technology doesn’t function in a vacuum (not exactly groundbreaking, I know), and that the areas in which it chooses to invest, the problems it sets to resolve and the obstacles it attempts to overcome all are dictated (if you think “dictated” is too strong a word, change it for “influenced”, the argument doesn’t change much for it) by the social circumstances of the people that fund it. Which, in our current age and place, means the elite cadres of Western bourgeoisie (what different writers have termed the “Davos elite”, the “Complacent Class”, the “Globalist elite” and the like), which at this point just yearn for more convenient delivery of richer goodies, chosen from a vaster selection, with less time investment (so they can work more and earn more money, which in turn they’ll use for more of the same ultimately vacuous cycle). Some of them practice philanthropy and throw some resources to solve some (for them) marginal problem like malaria or lack of running water in villages in Africa, but essentially the time and energy devoted to improving energy, human transportation, third world health, building, agriculture or manufacturing is zilch. Or maybe not exactly zilch, but in any case not enough to overcome the mounting inertia imposed by the regulatory needs of a complex economy.

One example I’m more familiar with: apparently a lot of investment goes into new forms of producing energy. But no new reactor designs are being approved or, I dare to say, will be approved for massive deployment in the next two decades. And I’m not talking just ol’ fission, the same goes for fusion, coal (although we are talking of super-hyper critical boilers already, the real equivalent to a “new generation” here would be carbon capture, which is as “not gonna happen” as any SMR), and even wind and solar. I can hear Tom Friedman scoffing how the latter have reduced their price in one or two orders of magnitude to which I can only say sure, as long as you do not take into account what actually building the stations cost (as opposed to what the estimates of the IPP bidders say it may cost according to the most rosy scenarios imaginable) and you take the storage cost conveniently out of the picture (to do things like, em, keeping the lights on when the sun is not shining and the wind is not blowing). So the vaunted reduction in renewable energy prices is basically a bit of economies of scale for manufacturing more of ‘em (undeniable, but overblown) and accounting gimmickry, as a society we have decided we don’t mind paying substantially more for our energy (not that I oppose that, I would just prefer we were more open about it and not try to sell it on false premises).

The question then is, why aren’t we collectively getting more bang for our buck of investment in the development of newer energy sources? And the answer is that the investment that does happen is simply not enough to overcome all the regulations we have found it necessary to impose on the activity to avoid chocking on the fumes, rad waste and other ugly byproducts. We have learned so much of the negative effects of the existing ways, most of which are still not fully borne by the ones benefitting from its production (case in point, CO2 emissions by coal-burning plants in most of the world), that we have created a very necessary mesh of rules to try to minimize their negative impact in our common well-being (and, again, we have not been entirely successful at such prevention). But such mesh also gets in the way of newer forms of energy production, making it simply unfeasible at the end of the day. A number of (mostly American) conservatives seem to naively think that it is a simple instance of regulatory overreach by that dreaded and hated Leviathan, the state, and that just repealing it wholesale would make all the good entrepreneurial spirits flourish and the innovations in this area (like in so many others) blossom. I don’t share their uninformed optimism at all. Most (if not all) of those “burdensome” regulations are there for good reason, and there is simply no way to just get rid of them wholesale and expect the economy to chug along graciously (that is, without going back to a grim past of soot and polluted waters for most, probably billionaires would still be able to get clean air and water delivered to them by drone). So in that are, like in so many others, we are essentially screwed.

But that doesn’t mean, again, that all I see in the horizon is stasis and continuity. Back to my argument about the distinct force of social relations: what the pundits and the journalists and the Davoisie don’t realize is that even in a scenario of technological (and economic) stagnation powerful currents may still be at work, accumulating tensions in weaker parts of the structure until they are violently released. Those tensions take the usual form in decadent societies (or, resorting again to Toynbee, in the terminal phase of civilizations): a majority of disgruntled, disengaged proletarians that do not identify with the characteristic values and goals of the civilization, and a minority of creatively exhausted elites that focus on their particular problems (for example, extending their lifespan even more without worrying if such expansion would ever be scalable to the forgotten masses) unable to offer any hope or any guidance to the rest of society. And when people realize (consciously or unconsciously) that’s the predicament they are in, when they finally accept that the idea that their sons (those they are not having, because life is not worth it anyway) will have a better life then themselves is an empty lie, that the fact they have not experienced a salary rise in a decade is not an abnormal glitch that will soon be corrected, but a newly built-in feature of the system, what will they do?

That’s exactly what I mean by social relations coming to the fore and displacing technology (or the arts, which are but an expression of the collective interests, and which in time of creative exhaustion instead of proposing common goals can only certify the emptiness and lack of meaning of every human life). And why the substantial change that awaits us will not came in the form of some magic technology delivering us from our present malaise, but in the old, worrisome, unpredictable, likely violent form of major social upheaval.

So a second (or third) revolution? May be, why not, most likely. Just don’t count on it being known as “industrial” a few centuries from now.

France and the expected return of flying cars

Reading the news this last couple of weeks you would be justified in believing that Western Civilization, the World Economy, our Shared System of Values and Beliefs, the European Union and the Powers that Be, all at once, had barely budged a lethal bullet and been saved of their imminent demise. The tide of populism, extreme far-right ideas, acceptance of inequality and rejection of the Enlightenment worldview had probably crested and were expected to start the precipitous decline whose opposition to the universal impetus of a never ending progress condemn them to.

Or so would like to think the lazy peddlers of secondhand, never-too-well-analyzed, opinion generally known as journalists. We beg to differ. First, let’s look a bit more in depth the apparent cause of such glad sighs of relief: the first round of the French presidential elections that took place on Sunday, May 23rd saw a moderate, pro-European centrist (Emmanuel Macron) take the first place, to compete in a run-off with the much-feared head of the Front National, Marine Le Pen. A runoff in which he will, almost assuredly, trounce her, as famously happened with her father in 2002, when all the forces of the “reasonable”, “established” political spectrum joined against him (as they have already joined against her, with one notable exception, that of the far-left candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon).

According to the received opinion, Mrs. Le Pen was cut from the same cloth as Donald Trump and the anti-EU politicians who caused “Brexit” at the other side of the Channel (Farage, Johnson, Gove). A dangerous extremist, an anti-Semite, a traditionalist set against the unstoppable progress of mankind, had she won she would have caused the doom of the decades long European integration project, the collapse of globalization, the return of national enmity and conflict to the continent, the confrontation with the resurgent Islam at Europe’s doors, the return to the demonic forces of nationalism that tore the continent apart a bit more than half a century ago.

Mr. Macron, on the other hand, which every respectable pundit is telling us should be voted, talked up, promoted, actively endorsed and praised, is your run-of-the-mill technocrat, not clearly affiliated with any of France’s traditional parties, somewhat nebulous about which precise policies he may pursue once at the helm of the country, whose main merit seems to be (other than the already mentioned non-affiliation, which definitely has played an oversized role in his rise) not at the head of any kind of avowedly “fascist”, modestly “far-right” (for the tastes of the commentariat) party. What seems clear is that he essentially promises more of the same: continuity in foreign affairs (that is, permanence in a European Union increasingly dominated by its more and more powerful Northern neighbor, more so after Britain’s departure in two years, regardless of the decades long suffering imposed by the policies more favorable to such neighbor for France’s dwindling industrial base), continuity in the economy’s direction (a modest liberalization and slow reduction of France’s public sector and a very gradual attempt to lift some of its comparatively cumbersome labor regulations), even continuity in the cultural realm (France is distinctively great, but such greatness is not to be too openly flaunted, especially in front of people “from other cultural traditions” -i.e. its own Muslim minority- lest they feel alienated or slighted). And that more-of-the-sameness is what troubles me and makes me think if the overwhelming consensus of the opinionators may not be wrong after all.

With that I’m not saying that I myself would vote for Mrs. Le Pen were I in a condition to choose. She has her own baggage, her own morally dubious choices (not least a potential corruption scandal involving a European Parliament stipend she didn’t have a problem bagging, while thunderously campaigning against the institution) and a certain dodginess that leaves me uneasy. But regarding the program of her party, the much derided, scorned, attacked, vilified and pilloried FN? I don’t see anything there that makes me want to run for the barricades, or that I would be surprised to see in as little as 2-4 years in the plank of any respectable center-right party that ends up governing a major European nation, without anybody as much as blinking an eye for it.

What’s all the fuss about, then? Well, for starters, I think it helps analyzing the situation in the light of the political philosophy dimensions that I identified in my last post. So let’s ask ourselves where do Mrs. Le Pen and her acolytes stand regarding our age’s dominant reason. Are they against it? I don’t think so. She seems to be OK with “the pursuit of happiness” as the ultimate goal of life, and with a certain form of well-ordered society where the police ensure everybody stays in its place, and do not try to overstep their station in life. She also seems to be perfectly happy with the idea of money (or property) being the main determinant of social rank, and with the desire for social improvement as the main (actually, as the solely intelligible) spring for action, the main socially sanctioned desire. I may be reading too much here, but if I’m right so far, that would mark her out not as a nationalist (that would think that it’s only genius, or rather a particular kind of genius born of a distinctive attunement with the ancient Spirit of nation, blood and soil, which should determine every person’s station in life) but as a more prosaic populist. What she is essentially telling her likely voters is that the values ruling our lives are OK, but the result they’ve produced (all those Muslims, and immigrants in general milking the generous State’s udder and mocking the sacred creed of national unity that built that State in the first place with their alien culture and traditions) has been thwarted and perverted by a twisted cabal of multiculturalists and internationalists, that dreaded “elite”, that is siphoning off the hard earned euros of the middle and lower-classes and showering with largesse a bunch of undeserving female genital mutilators.

That makes the contest between Mrs. Le Pen and Mr. Macron a rather uninteresting competition between two camps of cheerleaders of the current reason. In France there are no neoliberals (although some sentences of the candidate for en Marche! May be construed as willing to imperceptibly tilt the behemoth of the French State in a more liberal direction), so the discussion essentially takes place between people willing to change things even more imperceptibly, be it towards a more bureaucratic, redistributionist past (social democrats), towards an uncertain future where the main difference is stepping out of the single currency straitjacket (those have to be the populist) or towards doing nothing at all and hoping that a sustained improvement in the foreign markets will miraculously lift the economy and exogenously solve France’s unemployment problem (conservatives). No kidding the social democrat and traditional conservative’s (that initially rallied under the banner of the Gaullist François Fillon who, marred by a small scandal of his own, couldn’t get them in a number enough to pass to the knockoff stage) recommend frantically voting for Macron to block a potential Le Pen presidency (who is but a square further from them in my little map of political sensibilities). No kidding either that the truly leftist part of the electorate (who in the first round voted for the unreconstructed Marxist Jean-Luc Mèlenchon) are more hesitant to follow suit, as they see Mr. Macron perched between neoliberalism and conservatism, as far from their own sensibility as Mrs. Le Pen populism (which, as she astutely has observed, may be made to appear to include some left-leaning elements that would made it clearly more palatable).

However, the result (for what it’s worth, I forecast a slim victory for Mr. Macron, at least five percentage points less than what the press consensus predicts but still enough to get him to the Élysée Palace) is unlikely to change much or make any noticeable difference in the life of the French. This is still an exhausted social system, whoever wins. France’s economy, like the rest of Europe’s, will limp along for a few more years (and Mrs. Le Pen wasn’t likely to trigger a “Frexit” right away). Demographic growth, the rate of technological innovation and productivity improvements will not resume in the near future, and in their absence the lackluster growth in wealth will keep on being monopolized by a shrinking minority. In France, with its moderately robust State and redistributionist policies as in the UK (without any of those) or in the US (ditto on steroids). And the concomitant growing inequality will accelerate a negative feedback loop of even less demographic growth, less innovation and less wealth creation…

Until the system is exposed for the fraud it already is, the column of proponents of the dominant reason gets emptied (there stops being anybody defending it, outside of the super-rich one percenters that are revealed as its only beneficiaries) and there are no more neoliberals, populists, conservatives or social democrats, and only revolutionaries (under the generic banner of anarchists, although I wouldn’t be surprised if there are still Marxists around, their chiliastic faith has survived worse…) and reactionaries (the true ones, wanting to go all the way back before the start of the Enlightenment) remain. By the way, interesting article by Andy Sullivan in the New York Review about neoreaction, kudos for distinguishing between reactionaries and conservatives: Taking those crazy reactionaries seriously... seriously? although what he calls reactionary would be, in my terms, either a nationalist (back to the romantic reason of great Nations with a distinctive Geist -oh, well, it was always about race anyway), a Marxist (back to the good ol’ State deciding who gets what or, in Lenin’s as unforgettable as pithy definition of politics, giving an answer to “Who? Whom?”) or a full alt-righter (back all the way to absolute monarchy, when men lived for a possible everafter, surely much happier regardless of being dirt poor and mostly condemned to a life of endless toil without parole or reprieve).

Be it as it may, when we judge of the impact of a populist win we shouldn’t forget that, unable to change the exhausted dominant reason that got us in this mess in the first place, the only questions of interest are a) how long will they maintain the fiction that all that is wrong (that, for such reason, can only boil down to the lack of robust, equitably divided growth in material comforts)  is the fault of an evil cabal of outsiders that can be easily countered and b) what happens when the mask falls on that (historically, it tends to not end well for the populist in charge, which will usually turn their aims to new foes increasingly more complex to vanquish, until they lash out to foreign enemies and vast, cosmic-scale conspirations that require the engagement of all the Nation’s forces to counteract them… and we also know ha that one ends). What populist typically do not produce are viable, vibrant, healthy alternatives to the inert dominant reason that enabled their initial ascent. So not many causes for cheerfulness. Even after the Front National is defeated (again) in a couple of days, it is only a matter of time until its ideology (populism) triumphs, in France or anywhere else, tilting more to the right (to better ally itself with credulous conservatives) or more to the left (idem with hopeful but equally naïve social democrats).

Meanwhile, we will still be busy trying to formulate the true alternative that may deliver us collectively from such evils. Not too likely to succeed, but at least it won't be for lack of effort.