Tuesday, August 13, 2002

The Link: Democracy and The Work by which the World Prospers   There has long been a contention that democracy and free markets go together. In our current historical moment it has (almost) become worldwide received wisdom. Yet, to my knowledge, no one has put forward an understanding which forges a link of logical necessity between them. It is my belief that such a link does exist: it is -  The Work by which the World Prospers.     There have been three societal paradigms: (1) Tribal - ancient and universal; (2) Post Agricultural Revolution (Civilizational) – rigorously organized, imperial and authoritarian; and (3) – Post Industrial Revolution (Modern) - democratic and furiously innovative. The movement from each to its successor can be seen as a function of the work by which the world prospers.       Prolog: Our world becomes a fabric of vast, intricately connected, social, economic, and political complexity, which might best be approached with an ecological awareness. Pull, for example, on a thread relating to social well being, and the whole mesh with which it is interwoven will shift in ways seen and unforeseen. We should move with caution, pursuing our own advantage, of course, but in ways which respect the whole. Each element in the design acquires significance, and each of us becomes an important link: for now, everybody counts, and all must be respected.       The constantly accelerating transformative impact of science and technology on human societies, and the steady devolution of power from small groups of elites, where it has historically resided, to the people at large in democracies, were the twin stories of the (just) past millennium. They are not unrelated, and together they define a change in human history five to ten millennia in the making.   The transformation begins in Europe and America, about two hundred and fifty years ago.   Consider, for the moment, a proposition:   The Communist manifesto was published in 1848, and Das Kapital in 1867 (at least the first volume of it). Had they appeared one hundred years earlier, they would have been unintelligible. From any point in history, much before the mid nineteenth century, it was not who controlled the means of production, but who controlled the means of coercion.   We are social creatures. We live in mutually interactive, mutually supportive societies. Our first model for social organization was the tribe. It was universal, and lasted from the time we first roamed the savanna until a period between five and ten thousand years ago. With the appearance of large-scale domesticated agriculture in the river valleys and alluvial plains of the Fertile Crescent, India and China, a new paradigm of human social organization appeared. It was characterized by a far more rigorous and thorough division of labor. Specializations evolved, and power was concentrated in hands of governmental, military and religious elites. Tribal chiefs became royalty,  warrior/hunters became the military, and the shamans evolved into  priest/scholar castes. The majority of the people in these societies were relegated to agricultural labor.   The advantages of this form of social organization were immediately apparent and telling. Professional armies freed large areas of land and ensured stability over time. A supply of food was assured, and a persistent surplus of wealth was created. This platform, passed on from one generation to the next, allowed the ruling elites to realize civilization.  Indeed, this can be termed the Civilizational Phase of human societies.  Achievements in learning, the arts and architecture, science and philosophy are what we use to define these societies (and ourselves), and we regard them as our proudest accomplishments. (But, there have been no small number of horrors as well.)   In a relatively brief time, this new mode of human societal organization swept around the world. It was rather quickly established, among other things,  that fertile river valleys and plains, while important, were by no means an essential criterion for success. Its strengths permitted wide adaptabilities, The controlling element, however, became coercive power. This lay with the elites. Contention between and within elites was settled by securing control over that power. Beyond the established ascendancy, extraordinary ability in some given individuals could be recognized and rewarded, but this proved to be inconsistent - capricious - at best.   The vast majority of the people in these Civilizational societies could be assured of the availability of the necessities of life, but their grasp upon them was tenuous. Life for the most part proved to be difficult and unrewarding. The efficient organization of labor allowed the efflorescence of civilization, but the nature of that labor was a trap. Most human labor necessary to the success of societies, from the first emergence of civilizations onwards, involved well nigh universal, simple, human physical skills.  Success rested upon the efficient organization, over time, of the sweat of our brow and the strength of our backs. Any ten peasants could work the land or mind the herds as well as any other ten peasants.  Human labor was, effectively, infinitely replaceable. Control of the coercive power allowed thoroughgoing exploitation of that fact.   That is a clue to the change that began to emerge in Europe and America some 250 years ago.   In post Renaissance Europe, the systematic gathering, expansion and transmission of knowledge, which is characteristic of civilizations, began to focus consistently on  what we understand today as science and technology. By 1750 or so the effects of this were accelerating. In America, at about this same time, we had the first large-scale exploration of the broad devolution of power into a democracy: the creation of a society in which, by the fundamental organization of its powers, the creative commitment of the people of a society to that society might be assured. Together, these two processes engaged in the dialog which defines the last two hundred and fifty years, and creates our new world. Consider first the “scientific technological” element of that dialog.   By 1850 the power of a modern nation was dependent in significant measure on its industrial base. Coercive power could assert control over the industrial base, but it could not run it day to day. The critical labor, which ran a nation’s industrial base, lay with its entrepreneurial elite. Industrial entrepreneurs were skilled in unique ways, and were not infinitely replaceable. They were a new presence which could not be compelled, and were not co-opted, by the old elites. It gave them power - as Marx recognized . The speed of technological advance precluded the traditional, but slow, enfolding of this new elite into established power structures. From a longer perspective, however, the power of industrial entrepreneurs is illusory. In the end it drains away to those they employ! In the early industrial age, of course, it appeared to be anything but illusory - again, see Marx. But no such enterprise, even then, could endure an infinitely overturning labor force. On an assembly line, an individual is almost infinitely replaceable, but the collectivity is not! Once labor organizes, the game is up. And, as advances in science and technology continue to assert their transformative influence, the individual becomes less and less an infinitely replaceable entity. Sooner or later the real power to bring about the prosperity of an enterprise devolves in fact.   The traditional military/police coercive powers are rendered helpless against even the first, industrial enterprise/assembly line, phases of this, and the entrepreneurs themselves cannot hold power indefinitely against their need for increasingly educated and motivated employees. This does not necessarily mean that power inevitably devolves such that the individual realizes the benefits of his or her real position in the scheme. Indeed, grave, explosive instabilities often result from exactly that failure. In the end, however, those benefits must be realized, or the enterprise will break down, or fail competitively against those in which benefits and power are reasonably aligned, and which reap the continuing rewards of effective commitment.   Correlative, and in synergistic interaction, with this devolution of real economic power, is the devolution of overall power into democracies. The first devastating demonstration of the effects of this, I will contend, came with the aftermath of the French Revolution. All of monarchical Europe combined against France and its revolution. Initially in defense, the French became a nation under arms: whatever would happen in France would be decided by Frenchmen! The broad support of the people of that society for that society engendered a force which, astonishingly, swept all of Europe before it. That has shaped the modern political world. Almost subconsciously, at first, the world came (indeed is still coming) to recognize and to deal with the fact that in the modern world everybody counts! The strength of a society results first and foremost, from the creative commitment of a people to that society. Democracy secures that commitment.   Top down, authoritarian, governance becomes progressively less and less viable because it does not foster, and cannot secure over time the work by which the modern world prospers. Savagely exploitative economic relationships cannot be supported over time because they will alienate, even cripple, those whose genuine creative engagement is required by the very nature of the work to be accomplished.   Twin intertwining threads: the active committed intelligence of individuals engaged in a technologically advancing marketplace, and the creative commitment of those same individuals to their, of necessity, democratic society, define the basis for prosperity in this “second phase” of Civilizational societies. The ascendancy of America, Western Europe, and Japan is a direct reflection of their accommodation to this reality. The movement of the rest of the world to a position in accord with this reality is the story of our times.   It is an interesting time.     We should, of course, remember the ancient Chinese curse: May you live in interesting times!   The last two hundred and fifty years have not been a walk to the Paradise Garden.   Rather, there have been the convulsions attendant upon a new birth.   The wind sowed, we reap the whirlwind.   A new societal paradigm is being realized. The devolution of power to a broad base is in progress around the world. Upheaval and uncertainty mark its path, and it is not a simple question of opposition by the elites being displaced. For the people themselves, it is a new world and they must learn how to be comfortable in it, to feel secure in it. The possibilities for exploitation by narrow and particular interests within societies, and for dangerous and widely held misunderstandings by the broad base to which power is being ceded, are great.   The difficulties of this process are to be expected. The dependence of modern societies and enterprises on the freely given talents and abilities of their people is inexorable, yet real control over lives and the benefits native to that dependence are only fitfully realized. Turmoil ensues, and turmoil this vast twists and turns about in powerful and shattering ways, bringing out the best and worst in us. Its manifestations have been both glorious: the success of the American Experiment - a greater measure of political freedom, social equity and economic well being, for a larger proportion of its people, over a longer period of time than any (large-scale) society in history; the slow, but steady, evolution of societies around the world towards a stable democratic reality; and horrific: French Revolutionary terror, the First World War, Hitler and the Holocaust, Stalin, Cambodia, starvation and genocide in Africa, Bosnia . . . .    In other words, this can work to beneficent ends, but the passage is hazardous. It is for us, now, rather to facilitate the transformation, to seek its realization with ever diminishing pain. To do all we may to assure emergence of what can be a far richer and more hopeful world than any we have known. It would be my hope that, from the perspective herein, we come to engage this process consistently, compassionately, creatively.  We have seldom had a greater or more urgent task, or more golden an opportunity.     7:42:58 PM    comment []

Left/Right   A short hand way of characterizing the right/left divide on economics  would be to say: the left wants to hear nothing good about capitalism and  the right nothing bad. And So . . . .   To the Left:   Marx’s greatest success lay not in understanding Capitalism (he didn’t), but in characterizing it:  an overbearing monstrosity, thrown up by vast impersonal historical forces, whose persistence was to be decried with pyrotechnic rhetoric and attacked with revolutionary fervor. But Capitalism might just as well be thought of as a process (much like democracy): a way of going about things. As a process it can be seen in its aspect of constant creation and recreation: creativity is at the heart of it. Creativity within science and technology broadens and deepens our understandings of the natural world. Creativity by entrepreneurs develops the potentials harbored within those understandings into products. From this perspective, Capitalism becomes the organization and propagation of human creativity. By understanding Capitalism as a process to be stimulated, fostered and sustained, rather than a bogeyman, we begin to come to terms with its peculiar genius.   To the Right:   Of course, it must be understood that the organization of human creativity for profit can, at times, take on the aspects of a firestorm. Indeed Free Market Capitalism is much like fire. Like fire, it needs “fuel” and  “air” so that it can “burn”, but it needs to be watched, to be kept from becoming destructive. Fire in your living room as heat from a furnace is wonderful. Fire in your living room crawling up the wall, and about to burn down your home is not.  Dazzling innovation and explosively expanding productivity are wonderful, child labor, environmental pollution,  hazardous products and work places, violent cycles of boom and bust are not. Intelligent oversight, whether from within (self regulation), or from without (democratically mediated governance) is precisely the thing to be sought. We long ago learned how to make use of fire, and profited enormously from it. We are currently negotiating the learning curve for this new “fire”: the fire of our own creativity. 7:41:36 PM    comment []

The preceding is an attempt to lay out a broad overview of a line of thinking I have been working my way through for the past few years. It is the second such essay of its kind, and what follows above, after a brief caesura, is the first one I wrote. That essay (Democracy and the Work by which the World Prospers) follows a significantly different exposition, but, since the message is ultimately the same, there is some overlap in the language, particularly at the end. A brief interstitial peice on right wing versus left wing ecomomics (Left/Right)comes closer to a more immediate application, and suggests where some of this thinking might lead. 7:36:58 PM    comment []

Science and Modernity   The modern world is born of the nexus between human creativity and the discoveries of modern science and technology.  That nexus has created, and is creating, a world that prospers no longer by the sweat of our brow and the strength of our backs, but by the educated creativity of people.    Societies achieving a strong flow of educated creativity will prosper; those failing, will not, and will fall into eclipse. That flow will not come from people systematically repressed, suppressed, and exploited. It will come from populations secure in self-governance, rich in opportunity for innovation and its implementation, and able to achieve a satisfactory life for all.   The societal, institutional and conceptual structures of all previous human history have been, and are under, assault by a new reality whose birth travail has vexed the last three hundred years. The sheer prodigality of outcomes becomes defining:  such potentials are released for both constructive and destructive outcomes that we must be keenly aware of the power and responsibility that devolve upon us.   Modernity is about our increasing mastery of material reality. It is not wisdom (except of a particular sort), and it is not spiritual elevation, or moral accomplishment. It remains for us to inform the modern world with those achievements.     The above attempts to distill a message from the long arc of the human story. It seeks to define where we are now. Before laying out the particular understanding of history  which leads to it, I want to make it clear that I do not comprehend some steadily winnowing dialectic working its will through history. A Grand Narrative of sorts, perhaps, but nothing like a relentlessly evolving storyline. Rather think of change under the aegis of some great transformative pulse, followed by a period of adjustment, and a rich elaboration of consequences.   We are social creatures. We live in mutually interactive, mutually supportive societies. Our first model for social organization was the tribe. For tens of thousands of years we survived by inhabiting this planet as tribes. Between five and ten thousand years ago, to seize the advantages inherent in large-scale domesticated agriculture, we transitioned into far larger, far more extensively and intensively organized societies. What was required was enduring control of fertile land, and people constantly on that land to work it. What emerged were division of labor constructs, ruled from a narrow base of military, governmental and religious elites via severely hierarchical top down authoritarianism. Coercive force could, and largely did, suffice. The vast majority of people could be assured of the necessities of life, but their grasp upon them was tenuous. Most of the human beings in these new societal constructs were “division of labored” into some form of peasantry, peonage, serfdom, or slavery; that is to say, an efficient organization of the sweat of our brow and the strength of our backs. But we got an unintended consequence: Civilization.   It was no easy time for tribal societies as they came up against these new Civilizational ones. The strengths of the new constructs proved to be both wide and deep. Tribal territory was seized through the disciplined application of force by a professional military, and tribes were variously disrupted, displaced, and (or) dispersed. Not infrequently they were enslaved. On occasion, tribes would take their revenge by assaulting and overthrowing a (usually) declining Civilizational society. More often than not, however, a newly triumphant tribe would, in a generation or two, became more Catholic than the Pope with respect to what they had overwhelmed. They would be conquered by their conquest! So powerful and persuasive were the possibilities which opened to this new societal paradigm.   For the next several thousand years we circled within this paradigm, elaborating upon it in many ways. Many distinct civilizations, rich in culture and accomplishment, arose and prospered. But the bedrock minimum remained the same: an efficient organization over time of simple human physical tasks - any ten peasants could tend the fields and mind the herds as well as any other ten peasants. Coercive power was decisive.   Eventually, the unintended consequence – Civilization – got around to a new idea. A second pulse. It was Newton’s idea. It may not have been entirely original with him, and aspects of it are certainly apparent in thought, and trends of thought leading far back into recorded history, but it is incontestably Newton’s formulation of the idea, (in the Principia of 1687) that leads to its implantation in the fertile soil of post Renaissance Europe. Its subsequent rooting and exfoliation leads directly to modern science and technology, and on to the modern world.    Newton does not simply set forth that there is a gravitational attraction between bodies, but formulates it as a precise mathematical relationship. The force is directly proportional to the product of masses of the attracting bodies, and inversely proportional to the square of the distance separating them. The force is calculable! Precisely and exactly calculable! And a like conceptualism might be thought to extend to all of physical reality. The natural world is encompassed by a regime of mathematical rigor. Material reality can be described by universal, discoverable, mathematically exact expressions of causality.   After Newton, the Physicist Bernoulli, observing that the flow of air over a surface curved on top and flat on the bottom produces an uplift, can calculate what flow of air, over what surface of wing, will produce exactly what lift per unit area of wing. You can build a plane and know that it will fly! A child can observe steam displace a heavy iron lid from a pot. The grown James Watt can, after Newton, calculate precisely what pressure of steam against what piston head can, when translated through the mechanical apparatus of the piston, produce exactly what turning force on a wheel or crankshaft: the steam engine.   With Newton, science transforms from a cottage industry of inspired eccentrics into a constantly broadening, ever deepening, universal human endeavor. Over the next three hundred years, this constant and rigorous pursuit of scientific knowledge has yielded up a cornucopia of opportunity for human creativity, as both invention and enterprise, to feast upon. And feast it has.   A new age comes upon us and everything changes – as it did with the Agricultural Revolution and the birth of Civilization. The first great consequence of the Scientific Revolution was the Industrial Revolution. That, and the continuing advances flooding in its wake, so dominate us with their dazzling transformation of our material circumstances, that we generally fail to be aware of the changes in human societies that have accompanied the process. Consider, three hundred years ago there were no democracies (Pace Switzerland). Today a great portion of the world’s people live in democracies, and those societies are incontestably the most vital and prosperous we have. Three hundred years ago, if you had proposed that you had to educate all of a society’s children, you would have been laughed at. Today, it is the accepted commonplace. There is more to the modern world than the car in your driveway, and the channel changer in your hand.   The work by which the world prospers has changed. Slowly and inexorably, a world has been emerging that prospers by the educated creativity of its people. Societies have been, and are, transforming themselves in accommodation. As noted above, a strong flow of educated creativity will arise from populations secure in self governance, rich in opportunity for innovation and its implementation, and able to realize a satisfactory life for all: The New Paradigm.   Historically, that’s our story! The Grand Narrative (of sorts). Two pulses and two periods of adjustment, the first seemingly so far distant that we are generally only vaguely aware of it; until, of course, we reflect on the fate of Native Americans. The second pulse comes only three hundred years ago, with the rooting and exfoliation of Newton’s idea. The putative Man from Mars, looking back on the human story, would see - I believe well above all  - these two things: our transition to Civilizational societies, and the advent of modern science and technology. In between: periods of adjustment, and an exploration of possibilities within a general given, gradually enriching a matrix from which the next pulse might come.   From this it becomes apparent that we are currently in the midst of a period of profound worldwide re-adjustment - a perilous passage. Critically, it suggests a stance with which to approach things: Mutually undergoing a change as vast and sweeping as any we have ever encountered, we need less to confront one another than to work together to meet the common difficulties of the passage. We are all in it together, and such intelligence as we can muster, and such wisdom as we can achieve become our greatest necessities.   Realize first that we confront something new. The history we might search for insight remains largely the history of a now dying paradigm; one in which coercive power alone could be, and most often was, decisive – a paradigm attuned to, and successful in, an earlier reality.    Lincoln: “the dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. We must think anew and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves.”.   A world that prospers by the educated creativity of its people may sound quite promising, and, in the main, it has proven so; but the story of the past three hundred years has hardly been a walk to the paradise garden. The West, the first beneficiary of modernity, was also its first victim: the “satanic mills”, wars, revolutions and turmoil of the past two hundred plus years testify to enormous disruptions. All around the world societies coming to modernity experience a revolutionary change in their material circumstances, and, at the same time, feel a gravitational pull towards a radically new societal paradigm. It is all an invitation to upheaval and uncertainty, and we have had it: the period adjustment to a great transformative pulse.   The steadily increasing dependence of modern societies on the freely given talents and abilities of their people is inexorable, and yet the benefits native to that dependence are only fitfully realized. Turmoil ensues. And it is not simply a matter of resistance by the elites being displaced. For the people themselves, it is a new world, and they have to learn how to be comfortable in it, to feel secure in it. The possibilities for exploitation by narrow and particular interests within societies, and for dangerous and widely held misunderstandings by the broad base towards which power is moving, are great.   Our primary task becomes managing the passage to a new paradigm - for to make the passage seems inevitable, barring such catastrophe as, unfortunately, modernity itself makes it all too easy to envision. Tribal societies could not, did not, and perhaps their people ultimately did not wish to, decline the transit to a new reality. Today’s people face a similar problem with regard a transition they can clearly see possesses great capacities for a better life, but which also immerses them in a new and profoundly different world, with which they have had, at best, limited experience. With the best will in the world, whatever those who have substantially made the passage, America, Western Europe, Japan and the Pacific Rim, may attempt (and we must make the attempt) will be inseparable from the power of the modern world to both enthrall and disrupt. A volatile blend of envy, fear, and resentment is both inevitable and understandable. Our universal charge becomes finding mutually constructive outcomes.   The very nature of modernity opens vast possibilities for improvement in the material well-being of all peoples everywhere, but it also enables conflict no longer with sticks and stones and blades, but with nuclear tipped missiles and vials of contagion. This prodigality of outcomes, both constructive and destructive, becomes possibly the essential point. Recourse to violence begins to take on the aspect of striking matches in a dynamite factory, and peace becomes mutually beneficial for all, including parties to previously intractable conflicts.  Make peace and you can move on, prospering by the educated creativity of your people.   It seems obvious, to me at least, that over the next one hundred years or so the human race will make such choices as will define our future for the next several hundred years, or perhaps even our entire fate as a species - in so far as that is ours to determine. We can either chose a path of comity and cooperation, of peaceful resolutions to tensions, opening the way to a full flowering of our (now demonstrably) enormous constructive and creative powers, or we may choose a path of persistent and pervasive contention, locking us into the unproductive stasis of stalemate, or giving ourselves over to endless cycles of violence, bleeding incessantly, and lashing ourselves to the wheel of conflict.   I believe in people, in both their ability and desire to make wise and constructive choices. But this happens only in a world at peace. Threatened, we too easily become creatures of our fears and not our hopes.   This transformation can work to beneficent ends, but the passage is hazardous. It is for us, now, rather to facilitate that passage, to seek its realization with ever diminishing pain. To do all we may to assure emergence of what can be a far richer and more hopeful world than any we have known. It would be my hope that, from the perspective herein, we come to engage this process consistently, compassionately, creatively.  We have seldom had a greater or more urgent task, or more golden an opportunity. 7:32:47 PM    comment []