Ping Pong 56: Managing the Other
If justice demands that I live in a world where others also are, how am I going to define my relations to those others? How can I allow for and manage the differences between us? Do I have to pretend they are like me? Or can I rummage around in my soul or mind to find a point that I can contain their differences from me within? And if so will the point be a stable one? This complex series of questions is one of the profound effects of the collapse of the world of the imperial Western powers, and the long shadows cast by the twentieth century tyrannies. How, the question runs, should we in the West, be different in our relations to the other? How should we attempt to respect their difference? All the more so in the face of the end of traditional empire, how can we live amongst the other peoples of the world without craving to govern them? This was essentially tackled under five quite different headings: The problems of migrations, the problems of the economy, the problems of technology, the problems of other nations, and finally the problem of the Bomb. In each of these policies the strategy had been the same. Some aspect of popular thought and everyday knowledge was transfigured into a universal paradigm. The family (or the market) therefore was said to hold the secrets of examining complex situations, whose antecedence or province lay surely beyond such similar archetyping. Each of these topics will be examined in full in this Rant. The end of empire challenged the relationships that Britain had with the countries which it had governed in two main ways. On the one hand, it imposed the problem of whether the influence of Britain on other countries had ever been anything other than malign and selfish. There was in a sense, a debt to the people conquered, a blood guilt attached to empire. On the other, the empire had been such a part of the fabric of British society, that its influence could not easily be abandoned. This fealty was in effect double-edged. Britain had, as part of its imperial policy, not just formed the political systems of the nations involved, but also their culture (the caste system was caught up in the British Empire) and ethnic balance (the West Indies becoming a freed slave society).
The effect of this muddling up of peoples and places was that the British Empire actually could not simply die. Too many people were caught up in the effects of its legacies for that. The problem therefore for Britain of pulling out of its colonies, was therefore an intricate and complex one. Its political power was certainly no more. Likewise the ethic of imperialism that founded an empire based on commercial greed and the interests of a single country, was no more. But the effect of two centuries of imperial policy had to be negotiated. How could Britain therefore remain the heir to its complex legacy?
The answer found, was that Britain could only do so, if it became what it had not been for a thousand years or so - the target for large-scale and long-term migration. In opening up its borders to the peoples that had once been a part of the empire, it allowed formal expression within the context of Britain, of the very complex world which its own policies had created. Britain had imposed complex intercultural links as a part of its imperial policies. In a very real sense this was only Justice. In allowing peoples within national borders, Britain merely kept and internalized within its borders the complex world it had created.
And yet it would never quite seem this way within Britain itself; it did not necessarily see the opening of the borders as a necessary act of justice, but rather as an act of a guest welcoming in a stranger. The complex problem then that Britain itself had created was swept aside in a myth of magnanimity and faux bon ami. Britain ‘welcomed’ others and knew that it was somehow right in the process. However of course this very paradigm imposed a real and utterly false condition on this welcoming. The people who came were to be guests, at least as far as it was initially understood. The implication of course was obvious. They were welcome, but only as guests are welcome. Britain hoped thereby to maintain a whip hand over the peoples which it had invited. It hoped to insist that the peoples coming in were its choice (it invited them), and it might not invite them. The effect was, that that very tolerance of other peoples (who were allowed to keep their own culture) was itself caught up in something rather dark. Britons tolerated to allow them an impossible myth, the myth that somehow these people were guests and might one day return (in some way). No matter that there was now nowhere for such people to return to (not since the empire has corroded older ways of being). The collapse of this myth and coping with the effects of such a collapse is of course one of the deeper problems of the last few years or so.
On the level of the economy, a similar managerial role was imposed. The world would be alright, the argument went, the economy would work if only the leaders pulled the right levers, and pushed the correct buttons. The economy was therefore treated as an independent system akin to a machine, which could, given the right policies, be cured. A society was in effect divided up in this metaphor, into those individuals whom, if they functioned properly were merely aspects in this machine, and those who sought to govern it. The cooperation of the people was therefore in a sense to be taken for granted. It was argued, that it was always in the interests of folk to cooperate with the government and play their part in the overarching whole. The governing class therefore claimed all power to really effect things for themselves. They defined and refined the systems, and everyone else, all other cogs, then whirled around simply making it happen.
This myth of the elite somehow governing everything is of course a bewitching one. It is one that could make the world so simple, and so manageable. It is therefore a model which at times of crisis the world looks to again, and wishes to invoke. What is the G20 but the latest expression of this myth? That is, the dream that there are real levers that can be pulled (and money spent) to make a problem go away. However the experience of the past (and in all probability the experience to come) was that it was never really that simple. In the end the analogy between the economy and a machine was an imperfect one. People never really behaved as cogs. They had a tendency to become proactive, changing exactly what the machine was and how what it did could be defined. It had an irritating way of responding therefore to every policy one imposed upon it, and changing in the light of these policies. A change that then destroyed (in part) the very conditions on which the policy was based. A destruction that then of course undermined every simple managerial attempt at governance.
Thirdly the dream of technocracy insists that it ought to be possible to manage our relationship to technology in a certain order manner. On needed therefore gurus who could direct the way in which technology developed and how it was introduced into society. It would then be the function of such gurus to also ensure that the best possible practice (whatever that might mean) was followed. However this approach is actually doubly flawed. On the one it is the experience of the last thirty years or more that major technological advance is rather hard to simply predict. What was thought to be useful (say the hovercraft) actually turned out to be problematic and complex; what was thought merely to be a sideshow (the computer mouse or the internet) turned out to be highly adaptable. Gurus’ ability therefore, to predict the future was always flawed. On the other hand, and more complicatedly, one tends to get the developments that one is interested in. That is, health care follows public interest. As a society we are therefore rather good at saving drunkard’s lives, and dishing out pills for blood pressure. We are less able at actually spending the money to regulate citizen’s lives and avoid the problem in the first place (we merely ban things such as smoking to effect this). The advances that we get have therefore nothing to do with the power of technology to fall from outside and change everything (power which a guru might usefully forecast). Change rather grows up from the inside and enables and challenges what we already are. Or at least it has a tendency to do so, as that is where the money is. In short a technocracy and its gurus are only as good as one’s ability to predict where technology in itself might lead one. A perhaps noble idea, however one might make such predictions, but it is never the case that technology simply leads, it is always more complex that that, and as such defies simple management.
An even more tricky problem of course faced Britain (and to a degree all the ex-colonial powers) of how to manage their position within a world where they were now bit player. Here two clear (and rather different) strategies might be followed. On the one hand the ex-imperial powers might assert their power and their rights to influence, by insisting that they were all part of the same club. That is the ‘reformed colonial oppressors, pretending to be something different now’ club or the EEC if you prefer. The main thrust of this club was (an even more is) to assert once again the right of Europe against the rest of the world by creating a bloc large enough and powerful enough to shove against any and everyone, and do so at the cost of the individual states’ relationship to the rest of the world. For example migration being a political ‘problem’ in Britain is now tied up with the European Union (both by the issue of border control and the problems of Eastern European migrants). Britain is therefore forced to act against its old migrants (the colonies) in the interests of its ‘new friends’.
On the other hand individual nations might attempt to re-invent themselves as their position allows. They might then claim somehow greater wisdom when it came to governance, than the new powers that dominate the world (the wise old councillor gambit). Britain therefore always cosies up to whatever powers are around (traditionally America but also increasingly China and India). It seeks to invent ‘inclusive’ myths such as the ‘special relationship’ or the EU which bind the fate of Britain to the fate of other countries, a perpetual junior partner and possible ‘moderating influence’. The result is of course, that the fate of Britain abroad is absolutely defined by the popularity (or not) of whatever colonial power we are currently sucking up to. However with the additional problem that very often, in the places we are operating in, there has been a history of British involvement stretching back to the old Empire. Britain is genuinely loathed in Afghanistan and parts of Africa in a way that America (or China) are not. It is therefore simply different for Britain to be caught meddling in other states, a factor which the special relationship (and the ‘wise old councillor’) myth simply ignores.
Finally one of the legacies of the Second World War (as considered in previous Rants in this series) was to look for moral certainty. The post-war world invented or re-pitched this certainty. One could re-pitch in the context of opposed systems: Communism and capitalism, each claimed to be better than the other, an opposition that was then confirmed and bolstered because both systems had the ability to destroy the world. The possibility for absolute nuclear destruction was therefore poured into a mould of binary opposition and mutually exclusive claims to be on the side of right and morality. Armageddon therefore created or demanded a world of certainty in which to contain it. We needed simple (if relative) good and evil categories to cope with our own ability to destroy. Global polices therefore became rather easy to manage. It was merely a question of us and them. One might therefore be the most unlikely of allies, and yet allies one would be, if one came down on one side or the other in the Armageddon factor (the Cold War). In the face of which, all actual (and very real) differences and all other moralities were forced to slide or warp.
The nuclear bomb created or forced on the world therefore a moral certainty that undercut everything (and made everything else depend upon it). The Americans and the Taliban were allies, therefore in the face of Russia, an alliance forged in the face of good sense and subsequent affects. The collapse then of one party in this system (due to failures in its own internal management) destroyed this neat opposition, and broke the nuclear monopoly that buttressed it. The effect of this disruption is of course still very much with us, as we ponder the problem of how to live in a suddenly non-morally-absolutist world, a world where our actions will be judged by other criteria than a simple ‘us and them’.
Running across all these attempts to manage the world, runs the same basic move. Maybe, the claim runs, the world will be alright if the others will behave and therefore allow us to predict it and contain it. To manage is therefore to attempt to entrap other’s differences. The problem of course has been, that each of these moves have by and large failed. Difference and otherness have a habit of breaking through the neat little bounds which we set for them. It endlessly transforms its nature, and in becoming something else, defies simple containment and easy reading and thoughts. If one is going to genuinely confront difference, then one is going to have to look elsewhere than the thing which one already knew. We are going to have to look at what genuinely always allows another to be different to ourselves. A move which was perhaps best summarised in recent times by the thinker Levinas, and it is to his formation of the Other that the next of these Rants will turn.
