The Old Old Problem: Part 2

Spinoza suggests that aristocracies represent a very different type of government to monarchies, and one that is far closer to the ‘ideal’’ type of government. Once again one needs to take the care to understand what is significant in his claim. For Spinoza it is clear that an Aristocracy has one deep advantage over a monarchy. Such a state does not rest upon a single axis, or universal ‘explanations’, but rather attempts to allow for, and to articulate the very real differences in kind between the numerous activities of its citizens. The deep problem, which an aristocracy strives against, is the definition of a single axis, in which all differences can be located. Our age is of course plagued with such axes. It is all to easy for one to define one monarchical strand, that claims to wrap up all the rest, in its sweet, if poisonous embrace. Our world is populated with such ‘single solutions’ be they the free market, free speech, or ‘strategic thinking’, which offer a single way out of a complex problem.

  The real problem with all such solutions is that they all utilize that fact, considered in last week’s rant, that another ‘world’, that is another set of differences, either always looks simple or alternatively terrifying, from one’s own complex perspective.  

  Take as an example, the odd, and very poisonous relationship between media and politicians. On the side of the media, the world of the politician is routinely understood in extremely simplistic terms. All politicians are either fools or criminals (or both). They cannot raise party funds without breaking the rules (the question as to the sense of those rules is never asked). They cannot enact a policy without getting it wrong (banks might be saved, but it could always have been better). They cannot administer a system without being personally responsible for all the errors that such a system are prone to… The dynamic of our media, that is the dynamic of its own complex system, necessitates that it attempts to grasp the political world, not as complexity, but rather as a comedy or morality play; where every cock up is the direct result of folly or criminality, and not (as is almost certainly the case, merely an inevitable product of any very complex system).

  On the other hand there are the politicians themselves, who clearly take the media, and the folly of their stories more seriously than perhaps they deserve. The problem here is that the politicians are ultimately dependent for their jobs on that silent and invisible body of people - ‘the public’. Here the politicians are very caught in a cleft stick, removed as they are from this group, and yet utterly dependent upon them, them and ‘their’ apparent whims. The idea of mass journalism, serves as an answer to this problem. The Journalist, for the politician at least, appears to codify the wants and desires of their readers in a relatively simplistic manner. The Journalist thereby gives the politician an audience to work with (and for) and lessens the uncomfortableness of ‘performing politics’ in a vacuum.

   Each complex world, feeds off what appears to be simple in another world and does so even if, as in the case of the politician grasping at journalism, that simplistic element is itself a poison. All genuine debate, is thereby quietly marginalized or even excluded. And one quietly slips from an aristocracy, with its many different voices, into a monarchy with its single voice. That is, in the above case, the worlds of the journalist, and the politicians hook up together, combining their simplicities to form a single axis, complete and universal in itself (the Westminster village). The first deep problem of aristocracy is therefore one of defence. How, Spinoza asks, can one defend the world of difference? (a question that bedevilled later philosophy, be it Nietzsche or Mill).

  Spinoza’s immediate power perhaps lies in his very innocence. He suggests that what defines an aristocracy is the fact that its governing body must always wield its power collectively, and within a carefully demarked council. Outside this sphere each Aristocrat, has no power to act in themselves. Hence the advantage of this system, Spinoza suggests, lies in the fact that all members of the council are at once a part of the people and the government. As they act within the latter sphere, that is, as they do ‘governmenty things’ the experience of the former world is articulated within the context of a council, that also contains many other voices. Thence government becomes open to many different voices, all of which will be both bounced off and balance with one another.

  Perhaps so far this model might well appear to be really rather like that  ‘ideal’ of parliamentary democracies that we all might hope to live in. And yet Spinoza would be adamant that this was not the case, for two reasons. Firstly Spinoza advocates a very different form of selection, than our current system could encompass. Secondly, the model of the internal politics of government is distinctly different. Each of these will be discussed in turn. Once again my aim in this discussion is not to ‘do Spinoza’ or even to create some ludicrous (and highly simplistic) checklist by which Spinoza could be allowed to judge modernity (or the other way around). On the contrary it is to abstract within the fiery words of Spinoza, that which still burns bright today.

  One of the most ‘shocking’ elements to the all too hasty modern reader of Spinoza, is the means of selection which he advocated for his aristocracies. The selection to his council is not by election but selection (although he does not want it by birth). The positive reason that Spinoza gives is clear. If the council has enough voices from enough communities within it (and is selected to include those voices) then nothing is added by election (the House of Lords). Indeed, Spinoza would no doubt add with a smile, that if one has a politics of representation, one will greatly reduce the possible catchment area of politicians (or at least their own leaders) to those who present well, and one is already very far down the road of a tyranny of presentations (over substance). At which point, perhaps modernity might well attempt a ‘historical’ reply. That is, we might claim that ‘Spinoza’s system’ is all very well for seventeenth century Holland, where the population was far smaller than today, and the occupations less varied, but it would not work now. Perhaps alarmingly for modernity, Spinoza might very well acquiesce to this point. But in doing so he would remark that this point does not prevent the central problem from being the one which he defined.

  Indeed he might well go so far as to note that the current Western system actually at a critical point articulates, breaks, and then inverts the very differences that Spinoza thinks so vital to government. Modern general election campaigns rest on the ‘discovery of difference’ with the population. These ‘’differences’’ are integral to how the political campaigners develop their campaigns. Each party attempts to pitch to a certain selection of differences (women, Muslims, the Poor, the Rich, Mondeo Man, Westminster village…). They claim to ‘represent them’, and hope that if their claim is believed, it will be enough to capture an entire swathe of the population’s votes. The very differences which Spinoza sought to articulate as government, are the ones that each party attempts to encompass within its single monarchical embrace. After the election, these differences are quietly forgotten. It is now the people who have ‘spoken’, and who have ‘decided’ as if they were a single body (that is a monarchy), the nature of the government. Spinoza’s contention is that it is a clear mistake to lose sight of these differences within a supposed unified ‘people’ and government. It would be far better in our times, as in his, to attempt to understand what it might mean to articulate those differences (women, Mondeo man, travellers…) directly into government. One might then, Spinoza would suggest, have a real chance of dethroning that monarch – the People (and the peoples’s politicians who serve that monarch) who otherwise muscle into the gap between differences and their articulations into one another.

However it is clearly the case that it is no mean feat to articulate such differences into government. Indeed modernity has clearly failed at the first hurdle. We found it much so much easier to multiply monarchies, rather than developing a sensible system to allow differences to formerly stand by (and complexify) each other. Spinoza’s aspiration lies in articulating a double set of axes, one of which creates degrees or textures within government, the other which jangles across these differences, and makes them resonate slightly otherwise. The first of these axes, develops a theory of government by subset. The Aristocrats are a fixed subset (a fixed fraction) of the population. The senate (who manage day to day affairs) are a subset of the number of aristocrats; the inner council (who decide routine policy) are a subset of this group. At each point the numbers are selected to ensure that each successive group has enough members to represent the differences in the previous body. Hence the system rests upon the idea that the collective ‘nature’ of each body is only formally given within the succeeding tier of government. A council might do ‘councilly things’ and yet it is never the council who does these things, it is the senate. Likewise the senate might act in its own interest, and yet the body that so acts, is never the senate itself, but a body only in part dependent upon it. Spinoza thereby hopes to at once separate out and articulate the different interests in government (that is the difference between ‘doing governmenty things’, from governing), with the former being accountable to the latter.

  However Spinoza, never an idealist, knows that this distinction will be difficult to hold (Governments do so like doing ‘governmenty things’). He suggests therefore both external and internal checks to the system. The inner council changes its exact composition three times in a year – so that its actions need to be collective and consensual, to stand a chance of passed. Likewise each member of the senate and inner council must stand for election once a year, so must be permanently worried about their position. ‘Governmenty things’ must be made accountable to the government, at each turn. That is, the complexity of governing, must jar constantly against differences caught up in a world beyond the sphere of government itself. The politician is not caught in a five year vacuum but forced, almost constantly to think of differences elsewhere.

   Moreover, Spinoza is aware that this by itself will not be enough. There needs to be a separate body, called by him the Syndics, who are kept apart from the governing classes. It is this body who are tasked with keeping the actions of government permanently under open scrutiny. Their role is less parliamentary watchdog (which only watches what parliament decides should be watched) and more the role played by the media or (at times) comedy, in the current system. They serve as a perpetual and open critique of government. Critically for Spinoza, no informal feedback is allowed from this critique back into government itself. Spinoza would, when looking at our system, have no doubt the harshest of words to say. We have very clearly lost sight of this deep division, and have allowed a ‘Westminster village’ to set itself up as the ‘dodgy’ heart of government itself. In so doing, Spinoza would claim that we have imperilled our very ability to think (and to be) free(dom)

  Moreover Spinoza has not (quite) finished with us yet. Famously he died (of tuberculosis) while considering the final possible system of government, a democracy. What makes a democracy different from an aristocracy, is that it swaps over critical elements of unity and difference. An aristocracy demands voting, and so implies that a majority rules. The minorities (and the differences which they represent) are only saved from oblivion by an elaborate constitution. In a democracy, a consensus produced by navigating the fields of difference, is constantly constituteded (and then modified). Hence there is no need for a formal constitution. This no doubt feels to this world of Aristocrats (or even monarchs) mere poppycock; And yet one needs to understand what such a democracy is. Its model is not the great union of a state, so much as that constant and highly creative exchange of ideas, that rather small groups of people can effect for each other. Differences are freed up to resonate, and create without any fuss or elaborate set of rules. In this regard Spinoza’s hope that a democracy might encompass as many as thirty individuals appears optimistic, a real target to aim for. For if such a group of thirty separate individuals (with their manifold differences) could come together, there would be really no knowing what they might create. In these final short pages, Spinoza issues a final battle cry. We have it all wrong he cries. The correct model for a society is not the monarch or yet even the aristocrat, where differences are contained, but that group, which can most freely articulate their very differences, and thereby turn them into a creative force, to make the world itself otherwise.

   Perhaps the uniqueness of Spinoza’s final book lies in this. That it needs to present no simple system. He has no ‘answer’. No one way that government must be. Indeed he predicates his entire discussion on the very realistic assumption, that as a country becomes wealthier, it population rises, and as it rises it becomes more and more prone to monarchy. A dimension given his own unique formulation of monarchy, which has proved rather accurate. His strategy, faced with this problem, is though neither to despair nor be reduced to mere ridiculing, but rather to philosophize. That is, it is pull out from the wreckage of history, other dimensions, systems of government, that might also exist, alongside the almost inevitable monarchy. If these systems are developed and perfected, within a monarchy they might then stand a chance of saying something different to its all too strident universal claims. An idea that was of course far too radical for his time, or for even the subsequent history, to fully encompass. An idea, let us hope, that it is not too late now to return to…