Ping Pong 61: The Factors of Discontent
The last of these Rants raised the problem of how the state naturally conflicted with activism, but it left hanging whether it was ever possible for activists or those of their ilk to invade the state itself… It also raised the recurring problem that the nation state is not really an adequate unit with which to understand or control the world. Many problems come from a plane far beyond the state, and do so increasingly. At the forefront of these issues is of course the deep connection between energy production and consumption. The amounts of energy which any one community or nation state is likely to need, means that that community (and all ‘Western worlds’) are open to strange effects from other lands, and ones which we have never mitigated or been able to control. Modern states are therefore caught between two very powerful and unpredictable forces, the people within the states and the world of power without. Between these two it has become increasingly difficult for a state to operate not only in a just way, but often at all. This failure and its consequences will be the topic of this Rant, where the first problem, that of the ‘activist state’ will be examined first.
There is no doubt that activist’s hearts are usually in the right place, or at least that they start in the right place. They enter the state then, full of a will to change everything, and at first something does appear to be done. Free comprehensive education is therefore suddenly made possible or devolution finally occurs. Things, that are big things which have been the subject of years of campaigning suddenly feel possible and do-able. Such actions are in sense do-able because they have become in opposition or on the campaign trail the plus ultra of a movement. That is, they are what must be done and blow the consequences. The power of the new government as it comes in is therefore the power to say hell to sense and insist that the manifesto commitments, however tricky or not quite thought-through they might be, are achieved. That is the power of a new government is to demand that the system bows to whatever plans it has, however daffy they might seem, and finds some kind of way to achieve them. The problems however start the moment one moves beyond this immediate happy land of action. How can the same ability to act decisively be carried into the process of everyday government (and not merely be a legacy of the campaign trail)? This is a problem that appears to defeat most governments in the end.
To understand this failure it is useful to divide the problem into three separate spheres. Firstly there is the problem with the people themselves, when they think that they have a government who is frankly on their side. The problem is that they will then look to a government for an answer. This looking-towards has of course been encouraged by the government upon the campaign trail. The government comes to power having promised much to all kinds and sorts of constituencies, promises that then simply cannot be met. But this is a far bigger issue than politicians promising what they should not. The real problem is that the more that any government promises, the more it raises up the spectres of greed and unreasonableness that always otherwise lurk in the margins of governance.
These spectres are in a sense utterly natural. Once a government aids a group of people, then those people will almost automatically assume that that aid is natural, and in a sense their due. The problem then is that most actions and certainly all actions in the complex measured world of modern states, are not complete. One acts, but one can always have done more for the Ghurkas or the pensioners or the poor. Indeed the more one does, the more possibilities one opens out for a group of people starved of possibility up to that moment. The more that they see what they could have, the more they want to help their communities, which is therefore to be trapped in an inflation of desire. One helps and one must aid again. This inflation is therefore true for pensioners who get used to their ‘privileged’ status, but it is true also for bankers (who expect the world to owe them their living), but also Ghurkas (whose demands evolved as what they were being given evolved).
Campaigns therefore are hard to simply end. They have a habit of always opening up on other campaigns. This is all the more the case because of the second of the three spheres mentioned above, the problem of the activists. To be an activist is of course to make a commitment to something larger than simply the campaign. It is rather to confuse oneself and one’s career with the cause which one is espousing. One is therefore praised or blamed due to the results of the campaign. One’s self worth therefore becomes tied to agitating for… Thence it is a natural facet of such a system that campaigners will often find it rather hard to end their agitation. To end that, is to end a part of them. As long then as they can find an aspect of the ‘cause’ to fight for they will fight, which (given the first of these spheres) effectively makes many campaign almost endlessly.
The problem is however even more complex than this. Media organizations long ago discovered that espousing causes or at least pretending at times to espouse causes, is a very good way to involve people in one’s newspapers. It becomes then a very good way to shift product. The media therefore are always on the prowl for a good campaign, no matter what the real justice of the situation. What is more they prowl around in the knowledge that given a fair wind and the proper topic, they can raise up a lynch mob and force the government into some kind of action or other.
In effect therefore this second sphere (the media) rips across a state creating various points of hypersensitivity. That is, there are places that one does not reform, for one knows as a government that any reforming would stir up a hornet’s nest (the problem of the ‘A’ levels is a classic example, but so is the problem of local tax, and reforming the pension so it reflects an ageing population better). Vested interest, if it is powerfully organized and can make an appeal to a wider population (and use the media to do it), becomes then a powerhouse in the land. Justice therefore goes only to those who can shout longest and loudest…as the state loses sight of the wider picture in the need to placate the powerful lobby groups within it.
This leads into the third sphere, the problem of exactly how the state concedes to these demands. Classically there are two methods to appear to make concessions. The first is to kick the entire issue into the long grass by invoking the power of a report, headed by some academic. This individual is then invested with the power to create a balance where no balance could otherwise be. And yet this is of course in the modern state, impossible. Such reports’ function then, is less to create policy, than simply to state what the policy would be, if the entire system was balanced and fair. They form then, not the resolution to the problem which they are claimed to be for, so much as an assumed sane moment in the hurly burly of campaigning. They therefore tell it how it would be if modern governments were able to act in a genuinely measured way. Their function is therefore to allow the governments to mix a little genuine sanity within their otherwise fairly reactive and unthought-through policies and concessions. However even this oddest of functions has of course recently come under considerable strain. It is then the nature of such reports that they take time (sanity does not come immediately). The political stink raised by campaigns might then be too violent to allow this time to pass. Reports are commissioned and then one waits for them or no and in the fierce battle of the campaign they become themselves a mere facet in the endless apparent struggle.
The second main policy of modern government, faced with an effective campaign, is to cream off certain elements in that lobby group and listen to them (rather than the others). This move is actually a highly effective one. A lobby group has one group within it favoured (say the Muslim Council of Great Britain) which is provided for and given certain powers and rights, while the rest are effectively ignored in the name of that privilege. The problem of course is, that whatever policies are then implemented are really only as good as the chosen ones remain representative of their alleged constituency. This representation is however rather effectively compromised by the very act of being chosen. That is, if a group of people are picked out as special and allowed a voice, then they will almost by definition stop being what they were, a part in a community band and limited by the other forces in that group, and will rather become its effective ‘lords’. Their own concerns and gripes will take over the debate and become it. It has become then one of the sadder facts of society, that modern governments can only listen to those who represent others by howling the loudest. Whatever else might have been done with society is then lost within this wolf howl of activisms.
This problem of allowing for the people is complex enough. But at the same moment listening has become so genuinely hard, the state is dragged in another direction as well .The legacy of colonialism, the bit of colonialism that always ‘made sense’ (at least to the old powers) was that it united under one country the needs of that country for energy with its political power. The problem then of de-colonisation, is that of allowing other powers and other peoples to genuinely run the industries which produce energy upon which Western life style depends. At this point, the two problems effectively collide. The problem with activism in a sense comes down to a deep problem about trust. Hence states find that they cannot trust an entire movement and rather must cherry pick certain ‘representatives’ or a least them-friendly members of that community to deal with. The same of course happens with the problem of energy. Given our sheer dependence upon other nations which we effectively are no longer allowed to rule, for our lifestyle, then the question is always whom does one trust in these communities to run the show and allow one’s own lifestyle to continue? The answer that it ought to be the people of the nation is in a sense vapid. This ‘people’ as a collective entity does not exist. Or rather, they do not exist in a form that would allow one to invest productively the amount of power (that is, individual wealth) simply in the nation in question (colonialism created such countries, so why should they have ‘a’ people?). To make the decisions about where the money goes is always the kind of decision made by a relatively small group of people (the de facto or de jure government). One cannot therefore deal with ‘a people’ but must always deal with a relatively small cabal. The problem then is of course that that will effectively increase the powers of this cabal over anything and everything else in that state (eg. the Army in Pakistan). The temptation is therefore always to ensure that this cabal is kept as small as possible and as separate from any concern likely to destabilize the relationship as possible. The results of course are for example, the oil sheikdoms. The West favours a lunatic form of government (and bows down to its representative), which is always vulnerable and open to possible revolution. In effect therefore the West allows a regime dependent upon it to flourish, in the various countries upon which it itself depends. And thereby ensures, or better exports, its own dependence. That is, we might depend upon Saudi oil, but we ensure that they are dependent upon our arms. What is more, the system has become so distorted, that the moment than any government or lobby group wants to pull free from that system and spend the money on their own national problems (Russia) or on the poor (Venezuela) they automatically get treated as a problem state. In a sense of course this is true, as if the money that we need to spend upon energy was used more effectively by government (or the power of having the energy was marshalled more effectively) then the West would really be in trouble.
The very dependency of the state upon other areas of the world, encourages therefore states to dwell not with other states so much as with small cabals within those states. These cabals then are fully westernized and thereby pitched against their own people. It is into this problematic world, that the worry about global warming falls. The problem is of course that global warming is, if it is nothing else, a problem both for the world but also about the West. That is, it is the West’s own pollution that by and large has caused the problems which will now affect everyone. It is therefore the mirror to the ‘energy problem’. In both problems the trouble is that small cabals lies at the centre of the problem of an issue that is held to have wider significance. In the case of energy, this cabal forms the answer to the problem of how one ensures generalised energy production. In the pollution problem, this cabal (the Western countries) by and large caused the problem, and yet now must pretend that somehow every one is (potentially) to blame (it is all China and India’s fault for industrializing). Given this basic set up, it is no wonder that neither problem (they are of course related) shows any real signs of being solved. It seems likely (but not absolutely certain) that to really address either problem we would have to change a fair number of political systems the world over, and ensure that the powers of the endless cabals linked to energy (and pollution) were effectively undermined. A move which at a time of global recession and projected energy crisis is perhaps less impossible than it once seemed.
Running through this Rant is an irony. The modern state ought on the face of it, to be a highly organized and effective unit. The computer ought to have increased its powers, and taxes, its wealth. And yet states have become caught in cabals which endlessly threaten them from within and without. This is not the hugger mugger of terrorist plots, so much as the fact that the modern state in order to govern needs apparently to create special privileged groups and individuals. It needs therefore to create celebrities of government, (in its own and in others). The effect therefore is that the state is greatly weakened as these celebrities wield real power and are likely to turn on their would be creators, and force them into particular actions. The problem then is for government, whether they can change their nature and by withdrawing what they do (to a degree) unpick the activist-celebrities’ power, as much as unpick their own. This is a problem for the next Rant to consider.
