Ping Pong 60: The Modern Situation
A fear stalks modern society and even more, modern government. A fear which almost cannot be named, for it is so pervasive and so shameful. That fear is the fear of the people themselves. To be in government now is to look askance at one’s own population. It is to run scared of them. Half the legislation in the last forty years or so (from dangerous dogs to excessive worry about allowances) is merely the result of such a fear. A fear that seems deeper than merely the fear that one might be turned out of office. It is rather a fear that there is something in modern society which is almost ungovernable, a something which must be placated and allowed for, so that government itself can continue. One wins power therefore in the modern system by allowing for such a belief. That is, one gains power by promising the reform of the system, and to somehow make it better, somehow change it so that the ever present fear of the people is mitigated and a new ‘bond’ a renewed trust is somehow built. All of which raises a deep question. What exactly is it that government is so scared of? But to ask this question is of course to miss half the point. This fear is essentially double-edged. The people, or at least significant parts of them (whoever ‘they’ might be) fear the government. They therefore naturally appear to assume that each and every expansion of government or regulation (ID cards, or CCTV) will somehow threaten deep liberties and infringe their right to be. People and government look therefore askance at each other and at what the other is doing, what is making them tick and wonders if that other is really a threat. It is at this relationship this modern fundamental difference between peoples and states that this Rant will looks at in detail.
It is certainly best to start such a discussion with the problem of the people. What has changed about their nature? In a sense what has changed is that over the last forty years or so, the very notion of ‘a people’ has surely collapsed, in the face of the connections that reach beyond any country and interconnect the citizens of that country to events elsewhere on the globe. In the days of Empire (and its immediate aftermath) these relations were relatively simple. On the one side, there was the Empire which one ‘went off to’ to govern or exploit, a journey often made (or at least justified) in the name of the country. On the other, there were other nations, other imperial powers which were one’s competitors and which one might cooperate with and yet only as part of a great diplomatic game. International relations were therefore poured into the mould of Queen and Country. But now such a model is no longer paramount (and no longer that containing). On the contrary multiple connections are fermented by the media (television or the internet) or by travel. Or again one might be genuinely British and yet one’s family might live elsewhere and be caught up in wars and acts of injustice (and the effect of British policies) in far flung countries.
The result is that the state is no longer at the hub of things. On the contrary modern organization has become fluid and viral. Connections jump and jump again alongside communications and across highly textured webs and interconnected skeins. For many years, close to the heart, (if it had a heart) of these threads was of course the media. It was the role of television and the newspapers to crack open the world and force one to look at places one would never otherwise see, and face up to consequences of one’s actions, consequences which the state might have chosen to keep quiet and keep secret. From Vietnam onwards therefore the state has known to fear the media.
However it is clear that this central role for the media has been compromised recently. In a world of the internet, the central power of the media to organize flows of information is clearly questioned. Other flows exist and will be endless bubbling up, flows that circumvent large media organizations. From such a perspective, it is therefore it is no wonder that big companies (such as Fox and Warner Brothers) enforce what powers they have over the new media (such as the copyright laws). It is only these rules that give them any power at all.
What is more it is the nature of these viral connections that the patterns and loops connecting them are endlessly complex and indistinct. Take for example, the modern worry about a ‘flu outbreak. At the heart of this worry lies the arch virus itself. The fastest evolving life form on the planet appears a real threat for humanity. But this threat is of course made more real because humanity themselves have taken on something of the viral pattern. We make then endless sideways jumps from country to country, and cannot easily be regulated within states. But then the problem is stoked up by that other viral entity, the media. The media, who are always desperate to run with events which make their job (writing or making ‘stories’ out of events) easy. Here in the drama of resistance and death ought to be a ‘great story’ .The only trouble of course is that nothing actually has happened much to report. All that there is, is a possible threat (and that threat anyway is not as big as it could be if it came from bird ‘flu). The result is that the viral media endlessly milk the story, trying to find pointless new angles and new ways to cover it. In doing so they stoke up the overall sense of fear, and drive the story very far from its original roots.
The problem with this movement is then of course that the very act of such reportage distorts reality. That is, the story gathers its own momentum as time and money are spent upon it. The problem is then that if the story fizzles out (the ‘flu is not a killer after all) then result will of course be that the massive cry of wolf that has rung out from the media, will make us far less safe. Or even worse if (as is likely even if it is a deadly strain) the problem drags on for months and months (there is not likely to be a major outbreak in the northern hemisphere now until autumn), the reactions of the media (and the way people will learn of the story) will become rather unpredictable and problematic. By the time the ‘flu hits Britain we will all be rather bored with it. All of which makes the problem slightly worse.
Behind this last fact is a glaring problem with all viral organizations. These organizations have a real power to disrupt what is there. They take the times and make them change. They ask difficult questions, and demand toleration for peoples that were traditionally excluded. In the name then of freedom and apparently mass involvement they shake everything. And they take therefore the old staid ways and make them shake in the face of the future. The times really might be a changing. And yet the problem is that what happens next is very difficult. It is one thing to sing a protest song, it is another to have effective protest. Likewise it is one thing to riot on the streets, or organize a sit in and demand that a government change, it is another thing to then enact that change and produce a meaningful form of government. Or to put it another way, organizing a revolution is very easy. Hear a tale and rise up, the rumour spreads, and every one is caught up by it. The problem is - what does one do after the revolution? That is how does one stop being a part in the viral organization? How does one get on with one’s life apart from it? The organization, as one is a part of it, is all consuming. It has its own momentum, it appears to be going somewhere (as the riots in France in 1968 appeared to be going somewhere). And yet the minute that one steps out of this exchange and attempts (as one surely must) to have a life beyond it, then the power it loosed appears foreign and quite simply frightening. The logic that inspired it slips then into madness and appears something to run from. Protest is therefore all very well, but if it lacks an actual agenda that allows people a life beyond that protesting, it is flawed and will flounder. Or rather the only place it might go, the route of continual civil obedience and eventual war is so extreme and hence problematic for the majority of people to follow. The viral organization’s nadir is therefore normality, the quiet world many crave beyond the hubbub of the street and the noise of the information exchange. The viral organizations of humanity which the last forty years have spawned have (with one or two exceptions) been the stuff of the computer in the bedroom or the television in the Kitchen. They have not therefore been the creator of actual political powers. By and large a viral organization is therefore effective as an addition to a life, and not its centre. One of the oddities of ‘terrorism’ is that al Qaeda is clearly an organization which defies this characterization. At its heart there is a viral organization which is prepared to go the whole way and wage real wars. And yet around this inner core there is the normal froth of the viral organization. The dual structure is then a powerful form for the terrorist ‘organization’ as Western states are very bad at telling these two elements apart. They tend to treat the armchair terrorists as if they were fully fledged terrorists and persecute them accordingly. The result is of course that they make their amchairer more likely to become fully fledged terrorists, and make the entire world less safe in the process.
The state has a real reason to fear the people therefore. It is not the riots that they fear. On the contrary the riots are the secret power of the state. That is, it is in the rioters and their failure to produce anything meaningful that the state itself triumphs. The state can always after all say to the rioters what exactly do you want/how do you want us to change? Shall we vote upon such a change? And the moment the rioters are caught up in this apparent concession and sequence of questions, their own disorganization and problematic and complex motives become clear. In the face then of apparent toleration and apparent concession riots disappear. We might therefore protest and remove the government but we only get another one, which will do pretty much what the previous one did (it will merely call it something a bit different). It is not therefore the power of the streets than is the threat (save in very rare cases), but rather the power in the bedrooms and the kitchens. That is the power of the viral connection to inform (rather than inspire actual action), and misinform. This power creates endless new flows which if their momentum builds can be ignored at the peril of the politicians and their careers.
Or to put it another way, the problem of government is that the nation has become far less predictable and far less certain. Political parties which had traditionally founded themselves on a handful or verities thereby risk becoming outdated as the power of their verities is eclipsed within other fast moving concerns. The problem here is that one can then only have two sorts of leader: One that is inflexible and endlessly flounders under the weight of events (Gordon Brown) or one that is two faced, and flexible, an yet ultimately ineffective and mercurial (Blair). Even worse the state might well be tempted to dabble in the viral itself. Political parties then attempt to start rumours of their own, and so undermine both their own position and even more the position of politics further. Or again one might announce policies on YouTube, policies that were clearly unthought out and problematic, but which one thought by announcing on a mass ‘viral’ format one would make somehow appealing and realistic.
Thus far of course the state merely in dabbling with the viral, risks appearing like a figure of fun. It gets the viral wrong, it mistakes the viral’s power for a power which the state can easily take up and use, and then cocks up to general sniggers all round. And yet there is a more serious threat here. The State might genuinely want to carry its power over into the domains opened up by modern communications. It might therefore want to regulate the new flows of information. It might think that it has rights to control them (as after all these flows have so much power in the country). It might then seek to undermine them or compromise their freedom. Why should it not? after all, when that freedom undermines the power and function of the state itself. Even more troubling, once it has gone down the path of wanting to suppress information, then exactly where the state draws a line in the regulation of people involved in this suppression becomes tricky. Does a state have a right to steal our secrets or force us to confess, if it allows that state (or that political party) to keep in power and augment its position (i.e. the various –Gate scandals). This is a genuinely problematic question in a system where the interests of an aspect of the population and the interests of an aspect of the state are pitched against each other.
For around the last four decades we have lived in a society where the simple correlation between people, nation and state has clearly come under very considerable strain. It is not clear that the state and the people are pulling together any more. Or perhaps better, it is not clear that they are pulling together on certain key aspects of modernity. The problem then is - how can we do justice to both? That is, can one have states which act justly in a world where state organization no longer has the power it once had? Or are we going to have to allow new methods of organization into the state or new places for the state to organize the world? A problem to which the next of these Rants will turn.
