Suppose We are Approaching the End of the Age of Politics

Here's what I think is interesting:

• That about 250 years ago slavery became scandalous. Then we had the two biggest slave states in history. What was that all about?
• That about 150 years ago war became pointless. Then we had the two biggest wars in history. What was that all about?
• That about 250 years ago educated gentry decided that government power could and should be limited. Now we have the biggest governments ever that supervise endless details of people's lives. What's that all about?

I think that, following Crane Brinton in The Anatomy of Revolution, the sign that an age is ending is a frantic effort to keep it going, no matter what. That is, when you need a Reign of Terror to keep your movement going then your movement has a problem.

Let's recall slavery. We've all been carefully taught to hate and to fear slavery. But the fact is that 1,000 years ago it was ubiquitous. Viking society was divided into earls, peasants, and "thralls." Thralls were slaves. And the Vikings had a grand old time trading in slaves, from Dublin to the Volga River. At that time in England, according to Danziger and Lacey in The Year 1000, you, as a serf, could make yourself into a slave -- and the three squares that came with it -- by kneeling before your lord and placing your hands within his. And, if you want to know, the Venetians and Genoese did a grand trade in shipping Circassian beauties to the harems of the Middle East. And, I believe, the Circassian beauties were often sold by their families to the slave traders. Then, you may say, a curious thing happened. Slavery started to pay, as Venetian capitalists started slave sugar plantations on Cyprus. And then slave sugar spread west to the Atlantic, and then South America, and then, in 1640, the Brits got into the sugar slave game on Barbados. A grand old time was had by all except the slaves for about a century until, with the rise of evangelical Christianity and William Wilberforce, plantation slavery became a scandal. And we the US had the granddaddy of all civil wars over slavery. And then socialism inspired the two biggest slave states in history. You know who they were.

Today, of course, everyone hates slavery with a passion. Only, some people say that we are enslaved to our worker-bee corporate jobs, and work harder than any humans in history. What's that all about?

Let's think about war. Let's admit it: war was ubiquitous since whenever, whether it was hunter-gatherers contesting territory, or marcher lords patrolling the borders of feudal agricultural empires, or the Romans marching their legionaries all over the Mediterranean area, or the Frenchies and the Swedes marching all over the German lands in the 17th century. The trade of high-status males was war. And everyone down to male serfs was likely to get involved in the lord's nice little wars. Then, of course, the northwest Europeans conquered the world, starting in 1492. Europeans completely took over North America in flat-out conquest. And dominated the Central and South Americas without actually killing off the inhabitants. But then a funny thing happened. The Brits went to India and didn't really conquer it. They just wanted to trade, and keep the native princes from their traditional loot and plunder. And when it came to China, the westerners couldn't or didn't want to get anything more than a foothold in China and demand the right to have treaty ports where they could trade with the Chinese interior. Then we had Napoleon wrecking French primacy in Europe with his abortive conquest of Russia. But Bismarck cleverly united Germany with three finely sewn wars against Denmark, Austria and France. Then we had the reign of the idiots and World War I and II. What were they thinking?

I don't think we have really begun to process what has happened to the war culture over the last two centuries. Except that war really is not the cosy thing it used to be back in the day when the Franks did a nice bit of loot and plunder every year beyond the eastern borders of the Frankish empire.

And now politics. Politics used to be a natural hierarchical thing, with the king the lord of his lands, and everybody in their place beneath him. The king was mainly concerned with keeping his barons in check, and the barons mainly concerned with keeping their yeomen and serfs in their place. The fact is that political power had a limited reach because it lacked the technology to extend its power. But then, during the second millennium, an idea began to grow about limiting political power. First the barons pushed back against the king in Magna Carta. Then came all the theories of politics from chaps like Montesquieu proposing a division of powers between various political sectors that got instantiated in the US Constitution. What was that all about? And then we get what I call the Great Reaction of the last 160 years in which rich-kid sons of bnourgeois businessmen and merchants developed a theory of totalitarian unification of all human sectors: religion, politics, and economics, under a single leader, in which all life was militarized into a quasi-military hierarchy under a Great Leader. We have, now, the idea of the great war leader extended into all areas of life, so that administrative and hierarchical power from the top is concerned in all areas of life, political, economic, and religious/cultural.

I have a whole jumble of ideas about this, but I have an overall notion that politics is past its sell-by date, that we don't really need a vast political-ideological structure, that the human future is something completely different. And I believe that the current frenzy in the educated gentry for political and ideological power is a sign of the end of the political era. See, I don't think we need powerful muscular political institutions. Modern people are remarkably pliable and cooperative; they don't need a blow in the solar plexus to teach them a lesson. They respond pretty well to the social and economic cues they get from the people they interact with in day-to-day life. It is a conceit in the educated gentry, in my view, to think that the power and wisdom of the educated gentry is needed to keep us all from falling into a dark place of hate and bigotry and exploitation and poverty.

They say that every human generation thinks it is living in the end times of irreversible decadence, and that strong action is needed to reverse the slide. Probably not.

What is probably true is that the world is heading towards a future that nobody has a clue about. And that, indeed is scary. But the chances are that our descendants with muddle through. Imagine that!

But meanwhile we have to get through the current mania in the Democratic Party -- symbolized by unreconstructed lefty Bernie Sanders -- to have comprehensive and mandatory administrative solutions for everything for all time. Which is merely to say that the mess that comprehensive and mandatory administrative solutions have created in our society is reaching the crisis point, and that comprehensive and mandatory solutions for everything have reached their sell-by date.