The Doubter's Companion Page 14

  If economics played a central role in the rise of free speech, the benefactor was more accurately the Black Death than the industrial revolution. The plague so decimated Europe’s population that greater concentrations of agrarian wealth were a result and established administrative systems broke down.

  The point is not that industrialization played no role in the creation of the democratic system. But its role was secondary. An effect not a cause. We did not proceed from economic change to prosperity to democracy in order to finish off with free speech as a sort of luxurious gold leaf to cover the rampant part of an already completed structure.

  It was the difficult and determined emergence of free speech in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries which allowed us to formulate our ideas of democracy. In the process those who spoke out were sometimes killed or, failing that, often imprisoned or exiled. But a conscious verbal reverberation gradually unleashed the democratic process—sometimes through reform, sometimes through explosions. It was this affirmation of the citizenry which made it possible to imagine a different kind of economy and to set it in motion.

  Within the West the same sort of historic inversion can be heard every day. Our CORPORATIST society takes pleasure in insisting on “responsible action.” This is, in itself, an inversion of our concept of the responsible citizen. In a democracy, society’s structures are responsible to the citizen who is the ultimate source of power. “Responsible action” suggests the opposite—the citizen must now limit the use of her power in order not to damage the structures in place. This amounts to the institutionalization of banalized raison d’état.

  An irresponsible person is therefore someone who disturbs convention by speaking out. These are by definition people outside of the specializations, the professions and the corporate groups. Troublemakers. In an exaggerated version of middle-class propriety, the quasi-totality of our carefully trained élites see themselves as limited in their public words and actions by their obligation to administer society in a responsible manner.

  Thus the structures and the education systems of the democracies have produced enormous élites which are unconsciously but profoundly anti-democratic. They may represent as much as 30 per cent of the population and occupy most of the positions of power. For them, free speech is an indulgence claimed by marginal outsiders and a luxury which responsible people put up with resentfully and only to the extent that they must.

  FREE TRADE An eighteenth-century theory of international economics limited by the primitive notions of what it was then imagined trade and capitalism might become.

  The West has passed through and grown beyond the early industrial revolution and the high period of violent and unstable capitalism. In the process such old-fashioned methods as free trade and its alter ego, protectionism, have become increasingly impractical because of their destablizing effect on developed middle-class societies.

  The tendency of those who have not evolved intellectually along with the practical evolution of their societies has been to convert free trade and protectionism into absolute abstract ideologies. Practicality can then be thrown out the window. Only a political debate of principles remains and the interests which lie hidden behind.

  This ideological free trade imagines a world in which everyone benefits by specializing in their strong suits and exporting the results to each other. This idea arose as a breath of fresh air in the late 1970s, along with the GLOBAL ECONOMY. Of course, the same sort of argument had been put forward by Adam Smith in 1775 in The Wealth of Nations before being internationalized by David Ricardo in the early nineteenth century. Its moment of glory was the 1840s debate over the repeal of the British Corn Laws which protected English farmers by taxing imported grain. This was followed by a short period of what seemed to be limited success, depending on where you lived and what you produced. This in turn was followed by catastrophic market instability, recurrent depressions and widespread political violence.

  The creaky old crudeness of the free-trade miracle can be seen in its obsession with specialization. Each person in a given place may not wish to devote themselves to coal-mining. They may wish to grow some wheat or research new medications, even if others in other places can do these things cheaper. Should the market be organized so that they cannot grow and sell their wheat or find the cure to a disease? The free-trade theory says yes. They must do only what they do cheapest.

  But societies limited to one or two specialties are no longer societies. They are abstract production units and will suffer from the ills of overbred animals which have wonderful legs but weak lungs or a magnificent tail but no brains. Theories of generalized market-driven specialization leave everyone—in all classes—dangerously dependent on one or two goods. And the market is fickle. We can hardly blame it for that. With every shift in the patterns of market-driven production and consumption, whole societies can be thrown into despair.

  We all know about the instability inherent in Third World countries dependent on the production of one or two commodities. Free trade, as presented in the last quarter of the twentieth century, aims to convert all of us into the equivalent of commodity producers.

  Protectionism offers the exact opposite—the promise of absolute managed stability brought about by closing borders. In theory the result will be a cosy internal balance. But few countries are self-sufficient. The United States alone could perhaps close its borders and survive, but only if it came up with extra energy and water. Besides, few citizens want a society so managed that essential freedoms are negated.

  People do sense that free trade and protectionism are political ideologies disguised as disinterested, economic inevitability. These days the leading free traders tend to be the CORPORATISTS, led by the executives of transnational corporations. They like a theory which permits their corporations to produce wherever production is cheapest and sell wherever prices are highest. It isn’t their business if this is a self-defeating idea. After all, those paid least to produce are least likely to be rich enough to consume. And those who pay most to consume are unlikely to be able to do so if they’re unemployed.

  Today’s protectionists tend to be led by the local corporatists; the unions and small companies. They like a theory which holds out the promise of all change being controllable. That this is impossible except in an isolated society with a nomadic or pre-agrarian economy doesn’t seem to bother them.

  While these organized interest groups argue, most people ask themselves why they must always be presented with religious options? Why must they identify the single pure truth in order to avoid an apocalypse? Is there any difference between Vladimir Lenin the communist, Mikhail Bakunin the anarchist and Milton Friedman the marketist? No. All three are ideologues.

  Like other ideologies, that of free trade contains unspoken contempt for the individual citizen. It is a despairing response to the complexities of the real world and the politics of despair always replace choice with inevitability. Indeed despair is the natural tone of economists when they are selling their theories of salvation.

  Since the early 1980s the explosion in the size of the international MONEY MARKETS has been advanced as a new factor justifying inevitability. But these money markets are largely paper inflation and are central to our problems, not a solution to them. Revolutionary changes in communication TECHNOLOGY are presented as an uncontrollable force. But communication has always been an essential enabling device of trade. However, it is not in itself trade, except to the extent that the materials of communication are bought and sold. Communications is merely machinery used or turned on, operated and turned off by human beings domiciled and working in specific places. The new version of the free-trade argument seems to be that we have regressed from being slaves of the market-place to being slaves of machines which are slaves of the market-place.

  In 225 years of debate, there have been several attempts at extreme free trade and several at extreme protectionism. None have been successful. None have been absolutely applied. The most famous�
�that of Britain and the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846—was concentrated on providing cheap food for the poorly paid peasants who had stopped producing grain to become workers. For Britain’s industrial exports and imports all sorts of restrictions remained in place.

  Free trade tends to be favoured by those who have power—as Britain did in the middle of the nineteenth century and as the transnational corporations do today. It is abandoned the moment their power slips away, as was the case with Britain. There is no proof that the period of freer trade actually permitted them to hold onto their power a moment longer than they did. Extreme protectionism can also appear to provide short-term pleasures, but it ends with isolation, immobility and poverty.

  Civilizations do best when they engage in careful freedom and careful balance. Free trade in certain circumstances in certain areas can be a great boon for many people. In others, it will be a disaster and provoke disorder and suffering. Carefully and precisely used, protectionism can promote growth, particularly among some of the weaker parties in international competition. Used as a general principle it is a recipe for local exploitation. Free trade and protectionism, once stripped of their pseudo-religious-ideological disguises, are useful tools which can be balanced for general benefit and stability. See: IDEOLOGY.

  FREEDOM An occupied space which must be reoccupied every day.

  FREUD, SIGMUND A man so dissatisfied with his own mother and father that he devoted his life to convincing everyone who would listen—or better still, talk—that their parents were just as bad.

  His movement eventually convinced millions of people that if they could understand why their parents and their childhood had made them so unhappy they would be able to live happier lives. This theory has been applied to unhappy people for three-quarters of a century. It does not appear to work. The pity is that consciousness is an all too rare human strength. Freud has unfortunately discovered an even rarer frivolous sort. Its main use has been to help novelists develop the voice of the inner self in their stories.

  Jacques Lacan later refined Freud’s theory by demonstrating that, in so far as French men and women were concerned, the founder’s mother and father were a system. Carl Jung simply became bored with Freud’s parents and turned to ANIMISM, a far richer source for the examination of the human psyche. See: HAPPINESS and AUTOBIOGRAPHY.

  FRIENDSHIP An imprecise emotion combined with loyalty.

  In a specialist and CORPORATIST society friendship is often confused with shared ideas or tastes or skills or interests. But each of these involves the weighing of value and is therefore an evocation of self-interest. Friendship is the exact opposite. Or as Blake put it, “opposition is true friendship.”3

  G

  GAMBLING, STATE-RUN When governments raise money by acting as croupiers, the systems they manage are degenerate and are closer to their end than to their beginning.

  The Burmese, for example, could always tell when a dynasty was close to falling; it would set up a state lottery.

  Early in the 1970s, Western governments turned to licensed gambling to provide the funds which TAXATION no longer seemed able to raise. This initiative has been blamed on many specifics: the financial crisis, tax reform which drastically reduced the contribution of the large corporations, the cost of social programs. The combined result was a lack of money which turned into DEBT and that debt into chronic restraint.

  From the moment a government encourages its citizenry to finance the state by gambling—which means by idle dreaming—instead of through creativity, work and productivity, that state is in an unacknowledged crisis.

  The only nation to have prospered via gambling is Monaco, which is not a nation. It is a corporation specializing in tax avoidance presided over by a croupier prince.

  GANG OF FIVE, THE Machiavelli, Bacon, Loyola, Richelieu and Descartes. Between 1515 and 1650, these five rationalists invented the modern Western state.

  This absolute statement deserves four caveats:

  1. Historic theories are never quite true, but then neither is TRUTH, and some are true enough to be useful.

  2. What about Luther? What about Calvin? There are always more names and no one is excluded who wishes to accept responsibility.

  3. It isn’t clear that any individual can be held responsible as the inventor of enormous social changes when millions of others are willing to live with them. Only the HEROic view of history, a rational deformation of true individualism, would assert that kind of personal accomplishment.

  4. There is a victim in every gang—often the most imaginative and/or the one with least power. René Descartes is the victim here. The official version of the rational argument was quickly attached to his name and to one of his books (Discourse on Method—1637), so that whenever there has been a desire to castigate reason as arid or castrating, the critics turn on Descartes. In reality, the doctrine known as Cartesianism reflected a small part of his interests. He was a man who took pleasure in entertaining doubt and tried to embrace the humanist attitude. And yet. And yet there is that curious observation made by Voltaire about Descartes not looking up Galileo while visiting Italy and never quoting him, while going out of his way to cite Galileo’s enemy, the Jesuit Scheiner, who did so much to block the scientist’s work.1 At the very least that is an interesting comment on the idea of rational certainty.

  In any case whole educational systems have identified Descartes as the source of rational methodology. Millions praise or demonize him. And he was part of the original gang, even if a victim of it.

  The other four had a more revolutionary effect on our civilization because they combined their rational ideas with political and administrative responsibilities.

  Niccolo Machiavelli was a courtier who lost his position when the Medici came to power in Florence. His writings (The Prince—1513, and The Discourses—1519) painted the picture of a government in which people like himself made society run in an effective and amoral manner by using the rational method. Morality was reduced to effectiveness and virtue redefined as strength of will or power. In Machiavelli’s scenario the courtiers or technocrats would look after things behind the veil of the Prince (Machiavelli was writing in order to get his job back). The Prince would be called upon from time to time to apply his judgemental wisdom and if necessary to ensure ruthless executions and punishments which “terrify and satisfy” the people.

  Loyola was a courageous and amusing Spanish courtier who turned to God after an unfortunate encounter between his legs with a cannonball. He invented the ultimate rational corps of public servants or courtiers and technocrats—the Jesuits (1539). As their leader, he became the Pope’s chief courtier and directed the counter-reformation strategy, which was largely his invention. His education system remains the basis for all of our modern élite training. From the business schools to the government schools, the methodology is jesuitical.

  Francis Bacon was an accomplished courtier who made his way to the top (minister under Elizabeth I and James I, including Lord Chancellor 1618–21) in part by betraying his patrons. He continues to receive a very good press in England as the practical and non-judgemental opposite of Descartes. In reality, he believed in an absolutist rule of law and a dictatorship of highly specialized experts as laid out in his Utopian novel The New Atlantis (1624). The English insistence that they are a practical people as opposed to the Cartesians across the Channel is based in good part on their fanciful opposition of Bacon to Descartes. As a result of this self-deception they remain the last truly ideological people in Europe while praising endlessly their own common sense. (See: ENGLAND.)

  Cardinal Richelieu was a highly successful courtier who ran France (1624–42) behind the veil of Louis XIII, exactly as Machiavelli had prescribed. The shape of the modern, managerial nation state was laid out by Richelieu. While Machiavelli, Loyola and Bacon were addicted to behind-thescenes manipulation, it was Richelieu who fully realized the modern use of secrecy as a central tool of advanced civilization. In 1627 (ten years before Des
cartes) he laid out a thirteen-point proposal for “a Rational Reorganization of Government.”

  The modern nation state, with its dependence on rational technocracy, is largely the creation of these four unpleasant, ruthless courtiers and one well-meaning, timid philosopher who was always careful not to offend those in authority. Four and a half centuries later, the contemporary middle and upper-middle classes are made up largely of employees who must survive in a culture of courtierism. To deny that there is an essential relationship between the two would be, quite simply, forgetful. See: MEMORY.

  GATT See: IRRADIATION.

  GLOBAL ECONOMY The modern form of ideology is economic determinism. It is presented as if neither the presenter (a coalition of interest groups) nor the receiver (the public) have any active role to play because the global economy is going to arrive whether they like it or not. In this way a complete ideological policy can be advanced without any discussion of its implications or any admission that it is an ideology.

  The Global Economy is usually presented beneath four banners:

  1. “The Global Economy is inevitable.”

  But there has always been a Global Economy. Sometimes it has been more, sometimes less global. And there has been no technological or managerial breakthrough in the last three decades which makes this more or less so. Our remarkable advances in high technology communications are useful on the international scale just as they are locally. But they do not make local or regional rules irrelevant. For example, these technologies have not eliminated the power of national regulations inside countries. There is therefore no reason to believe that they must necessarily eliminate regulations between countries.