When a man like President Obama rephrases the hope of Dr. Martin Luther King that the arc of history bends towards justice, he means that only politics can bend the world towards justice.
That is the Great White Hope of the left, that the sorrows of the world can be healed with politics, and specifically, a politics of equality and liberation -- directed of course, by people like us.
Of course this is a misreading of the nature of politics, which is simply to rally the people and unify them against an existential threat, usually represented by the tribe across the river or in the next village.
In the larger communities of the agricultural or industrial era that extends beyond the blood kindred this means that politics involves dividing people: three tribes against two, or two tribes against one.
Simply put: in order to unite people into a cause you must divide them off from something else. This obviously worked well in the hunter-gather age, because then humans were divided into tribes of the kindred and really were in existential peril from the neighboring tribe attempting to invade their land and appropriate its food-bearing potential.
In the agricultural age and especially the industrial age politics has adapted into the imagined tribe of the noble's peasants and followers, and now into the imagined community of the nation state. Still, up until yesterday, the noble or the leader of the nation state ruled a people that lived off the land, the produce of its rich acres. Up until yesterday the world could still be understood in the loyalty to clan and kindred or an imagined clan or kindred: if you belonged your owed loyalty to your clan chieftain or national monarch, and the chieftain or monarch protected you on your land from others that might want to appropriate your land.
Not any more. Instead of the comforts of tribal belonging we have the paradox of individualism. Each of us is no longer primarily the member of a tribe, but a responsible individual that must go out and find, each for himself, a way to work and thrive and this life is no longer manifested in a subordination to a lord of the land, or the boss of a factory, but in subordination to the supply and demand of the market.
This is very new and very frightening. I think this is the most important thing to understand about the modern world and to understand the way that politics and culture and work and play operate today.
I think that the rise of socialism and fascism both represent a deep aching for the imagined security and familiarity of the old equality of the hunter-gatherer village, and the old loyalty of blood, and the old attachment to land. So socialism and communism imagine that the old way yielded a satisfying equality in which everyone belonged and everyone mattered. Fascism -- here used just as a descriptive, not a pejorative -- imagines the comfortable past when everyone belonged to a blood kindred that had lived upon its ancestral lands since time immemorial.
But socialism and fascism are not solutions to the modern problem. The millions of graves give eternal testimony to that.
The modern era offers a different proposition. It merely says that each of us, as individuals, should subordinate ourselves to the needs and the demands of others, in other words, offer our skills and labor on the labor market and accept the decision of the market with grace and good cheer.
Anyone that has ever been "unemployed" or searching for work understands the holy terror of such a situation. How do I know that there are any jobs out there? How do I know what skills are in demand? How can I possibly measure up to the implacable demands of the employers? Everything is uncertain, contingent, and apparently chaotic. And above all, terrifying.
And so we have looked to politicians and activists to protect us from the existential peril of the marketplace. And politicians and activists have offered solutions from the past, in government and political division. But politics and government are clearly not the appropriate means.
We know this because huge and tragic human experiments have been conducted over the last century in attempt to show that politics and government can protect us against the existential terror of the market place. These vast human experiments have proved, from plantation slavery to collective agriculture to nationalized industry, that politics cannot protect us from the existential peril of the marketplace; it only makes things worse. The most obvious example of this truth is the real live experiment of the last 65 years in Korea. From a land devastated by civil war we have socialist North Korea with a per-capita GDP of about $600 per year, and capitalist South Korea with a per-capita GDP of about $27,500 per year.
The per-capita GDP of North Korea is below the per-capita GDP of the United States in 1800. The per-capita GDP in South Korea is about the same as the US per-capita GDP in 1994. Case closed.
And things are not so good the lands of "social democracy" where politics and government are used to obtain economic security for the politically connected from the rest of the community that is not so politically connected, and promises of security have been made that cannot be redeemed. The fact is that government and politics do not deliver prosperity and security; they are only tools to defend against existential peril.
Yet, we still need some means to soften the terror of our subordination to the marketplace, because we humans are designed and built to live and wive and thrive in human face-to-face community and not in the cheerless canyons of the market's domain where there seems to be no place where weary can shelter in the shade.
That is the Great White Hope of the left, that the sorrows of the world can be healed with politics, and specifically, a politics of equality and liberation -- directed of course, by people like us.
Of course this is a misreading of the nature of politics, which is simply to rally the people and unify them against an existential threat, usually represented by the tribe across the river or in the next village.
In the larger communities of the agricultural or industrial era that extends beyond the blood kindred this means that politics involves dividing people: three tribes against two, or two tribes against one.
Simply put: in order to unite people into a cause you must divide them off from something else. This obviously worked well in the hunter-gather age, because then humans were divided into tribes of the kindred and really were in existential peril from the neighboring tribe attempting to invade their land and appropriate its food-bearing potential.
In the agricultural age and especially the industrial age politics has adapted into the imagined tribe of the noble's peasants and followers, and now into the imagined community of the nation state. Still, up until yesterday, the noble or the leader of the nation state ruled a people that lived off the land, the produce of its rich acres. Up until yesterday the world could still be understood in the loyalty to clan and kindred or an imagined clan or kindred: if you belonged your owed loyalty to your clan chieftain or national monarch, and the chieftain or monarch protected you on your land from others that might want to appropriate your land.
Not any more. Instead of the comforts of tribal belonging we have the paradox of individualism. Each of us is no longer primarily the member of a tribe, but a responsible individual that must go out and find, each for himself, a way to work and thrive and this life is no longer manifested in a subordination to a lord of the land, or the boss of a factory, but in subordination to the supply and demand of the market.
This is very new and very frightening. I think this is the most important thing to understand about the modern world and to understand the way that politics and culture and work and play operate today.
I think that the rise of socialism and fascism both represent a deep aching for the imagined security and familiarity of the old equality of the hunter-gatherer village, and the old loyalty of blood, and the old attachment to land. So socialism and communism imagine that the old way yielded a satisfying equality in which everyone belonged and everyone mattered. Fascism -- here used just as a descriptive, not a pejorative -- imagines the comfortable past when everyone belonged to a blood kindred that had lived upon its ancestral lands since time immemorial.
But socialism and fascism are not solutions to the modern problem. The millions of graves give eternal testimony to that.
The modern era offers a different proposition. It merely says that each of us, as individuals, should subordinate ourselves to the needs and the demands of others, in other words, offer our skills and labor on the labor market and accept the decision of the market with grace and good cheer.
Anyone that has ever been "unemployed" or searching for work understands the holy terror of such a situation. How do I know that there are any jobs out there? How do I know what skills are in demand? How can I possibly measure up to the implacable demands of the employers? Everything is uncertain, contingent, and apparently chaotic. And above all, terrifying.
And so we have looked to politicians and activists to protect us from the existential peril of the marketplace. And politicians and activists have offered solutions from the past, in government and political division. But politics and government are clearly not the appropriate means.
We know this because huge and tragic human experiments have been conducted over the last century in attempt to show that politics and government can protect us against the existential terror of the market place. These vast human experiments have proved, from plantation slavery to collective agriculture to nationalized industry, that politics cannot protect us from the existential peril of the marketplace; it only makes things worse. The most obvious example of this truth is the real live experiment of the last 65 years in Korea. From a land devastated by civil war we have socialist North Korea with a per-capita GDP of about $600 per year, and capitalist South Korea with a per-capita GDP of about $27,500 per year.
The per-capita GDP of North Korea is below the per-capita GDP of the United States in 1800. The per-capita GDP in South Korea is about the same as the US per-capita GDP in 1994. Case closed.
And things are not so good the lands of "social democracy" where politics and government are used to obtain economic security for the politically connected from the rest of the community that is not so politically connected, and promises of security have been made that cannot be redeemed. The fact is that government and politics do not deliver prosperity and security; they are only tools to defend against existential peril.
Yet, we still need some means to soften the terror of our subordination to the marketplace, because we humans are designed and built to live and wive and thrive in human face-to-face community and not in the cheerless canyons of the market's domain where there seems to be no place where weary can shelter in the shade.
The question is what would work to humanize the terrible power of the marketplace. That is the topic of The Real Revolution of the Modern Age.
No comments:
Post a Comment