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Portrait in Salmongundy
A Salmongundy was or is a mixture of contrasting flavours, bland and sharp all presented in a single dish, served cold. It was popular three hundred years ago or so, where the contrast was meant to clean the palate, and captured something about the nature of food and life. A contrast that surely serves as an analogy for Western free societies. There is something so very weird about our political freedom. On the one hand, there is bland political freedom, expressed in the formal and extremely staid structures of elections and parties, manifestos and leaders. And yet on the other, free societies are characterized by their ability to create almost unlimited takes on freedom elsewhere. Or to put it slightly differently, a society is free when it can create, beyond the humdrum of the political system, a set of sharp contrasting ‘other democracies’, democracies operating on their own rhythm and through their own sets of rules. The two then are served upon a single dish. Additionally we are all so used to the contrast (and essentially value it) that we naturally assume that it must be. So that when one politician or other (looking for some cheap policy or other) claims that they will somehow revolutionize the local (be it to use the viral power of the internet to… or perhaps create citizen armies) the entire thing feels false (and possibly foolish or threatening). - As if bland food suddenly turned around and claimed to also be sharp.
On the one side of this divide we have the staid political world of party politics, media, and elections. These organizations claim of course of be the successors of the great freedom struggles of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. We are free, we are told, because we can vote – and so choose our government. And yet here we are on the cusp of an election where it would be true to say that no one feels that they can really tell the truth. - The country is screwed: For we have (since Thatcher claimed it was the free market) lived off the income created by bankers and pyramid sales of dreams of the money markets to fund a lifestyle way beyond what we could afford as a country. We are then in for a very painful readjustment as we find out what it really means to be a second class nation. In short we are in for dreadful cuts. And yet this is practically unsayable. The result is a false election. The politicians all have to connive with our delusion that things are OK really (and that we can even have tax cuts): All we need to do is to prune that unpopular class, the managers and cut out waste and everything will be fine once again. It will not. The point about our current problems, is that the rot runs a lot deeper than just the greed that having a lot of money in the system created. It is true that certain organizations take the money and take the piss (the universities who engaged in property speculation), but merely cutting them back will not be enough; for we not ransomed to their greed alone, but to a wider international greed, that has now collapsed.
But all of this cannot be said. It informs everything and yet… The result of course is that we have a very false election and really no choice. If we are worried about the problem of this debt (and we ought to be) all we can do is elect those whom we most trust to help sort it out. And yet we do so without any real knowledge of what they can do (beyond the anodyne images they give us). The entire thing then comes down to a pig in a poke, which of course we call freedom. We have a system then that does not allow us to talk about problems sensibly. We simply cannot have an argument about drugs that is measured and scientific (or climate change, or immigration for that matter). The entire political establishment (including the media and their lynch mobs) runs against it. Such issues represent then almost the only place in the system where we are allowing for extremist comment and possible action! All we have are certain repressive policies that our politicians find unnegotiable and elections that in the end come down to the politics of win or lose, as if democracy were merely a boat race, and that all that mattered was winning!
But why, one might ask? Why have the high dreams of democracy of two hundred years ago floundered on this boat race politics? Is this the best we can do? To answer this question one needs to understand what exactly politics does. It is not really about representing people and doing what they want (who want very little if anything of that which is in either of the big party’s manifestos – most of it is either crazy or merely in the ‘Doing Something’ school of politics). It is not then about representing us, so much as about containing conflicts. A society is a fractious affair. Dispute is potentially everywhere. One can handle that dispute by law and whatever authority is needed to back up that law, and the end, the result, will almost invariably feel oppressive and problematic (law slips into hypocrisy and protects the interests of big companies or powerful individuals rather easily). Democracy then offers an alternative set up. - One has a system which animates all the local and national conflicts, articulating them into promises, or trust to believe in certain parties, and so fixing them in an agenda of elections and campaigns. No matter that this is a dream; that is, no matter that the parties as often as not cannot enforce what they are promising to this or that lobby group – or that if they do, the policy will not quite work. The power of this system does not lie in what it does but in what it avoids, namely both civil unrest and repressive law.
Party based democracy is then a powerful repressant. A fact that is actually critical in understanding why it is so deeply rooted within the political system. For on the face of it, it is weird that the same party system exists at the local level and at the national. Why, one might wonder, when the domestic politics of parish or city are actually distinct from national politics? What is going on? One can see of course from the position of political parties as a profession, that this makes sense. One trains one’s politicians within the boring rigmarole of local government. And yet the convenience of politicians is less important and surely ought to be a sideshow in the overall scheme of things. But if the point of the system was to capture all the very violent local problems (of planning or roads or schools) within the self same system of antagonisms as the national government, then the system makes sense. For it is this local organization that makes the entire system irrevocable. Everything becomes, be it an ant’s nest in the house, the state of the drains or nuclear disarmament, codified in political parties, and the politics of elections. More than that, the antagonisms between local and national (that at other times and in other countries can be so divisive) become expressed in setting up local against national government in needless demarcation disputes and conflicts. The great product of the party system is that it makes endless potential violent conflicts anodyne – so that its success ought to be measured in the antipathy that it breeds.
The point then of the system is to be in conflict. Or rather it is the bland capturing of conflict within a series of set routines and monkey tricks that demand that it is expressed in neat, easy to swallow packages. The very anodyne nature of the system is its triumph. It makes violent conflict boring! But more than that, by creating a fixed and very staid political centre this salmongundy of politics allows other voices, other types of democracy to flourish elsewhere. For perhaps no other time has had such a rich ‘other democracy’ than ours. I do not mean here the faux democracy of ‘Reality’ TV, that takes a rich world of choice and discussion and crushes it within a money-making exercise of mild virtual bullying; but rather the plethora of different ways that we share and evaluate our beliefs, a sharing that is always creating new powers in the land.
The melancholy Marxist part of me collects different expressions of this representation. I.e. different ways within technologies for sharing ideas, and where the ideas themselves have come together to create other democracies – other ways of discussing ideas. One might then characterize these ways of sharing into two main groups (although this division is only for convenience in their exposition). There are those free societies that have been around as long as industrialization and those new creations of the internet and broadband access.
The old school itself is complex, with different organizations pertaining to the right and to the left but also knowledge. Often on the right there are those democracies of shareholding and consumerisms that I have considered repeatedly in this series of essays. On the left there is the rich world of community and unions. These two are quite distinct. What was at stake in the miner’s dispute of 25 years ago was in the end a conflict between a distinct community (with its own forms of sharing and understanding what it was) and central government. The message of the dispute was that at the moment central government always wins (a victory confirmed in the Criminal Justice Act of the 1990's, and repeatedly since). A union, which orchestrates individual oppression as a collective concern, expects its members to hang together in the face of it. Unions are have then at their heart a generalizing and sharing of a humanity that is oppressed; they thereby turn the mass into a political force in the name of the way that that mass is oppressed by a system that needs it for only one thing (making money).
But this need to create collective discussion and organization goes much further than this division of left and right, for our very knowledge is created by it. Science is of course at its heart a way of sharing information and experience, one with the other. The point then of this sharing is that it allows the weight of reality (experimentation) to impress itself upon a diversity of sceptical minds, allowing new patterns to appear, and removing false dreams. Science is nothing if it is not such a way to organize freedom; the freedom here, being a freedom to think, to discuss but also to act. - A freedom based on not shared values but an assumption of shared knowledge. One is only able to pool ideas, and to be free within the scientific world if one knows enough to understand what that freedom means and how it ought to be expressed (and so how it relates to others, and their viewpoints). One is then free as one knows, and as one is open to the ideas of others. The challenge then is always for science to keep those necessary criteria for freedom itself, open. Science’s knowledge needs not to be an occult one knowable only to initiates, but must rather be founded on rational and (within reason) testable (or logical) premises.
These traditional methods of sharing have used the printed word and word of mouth (in pubs and clubs) to create distinct collective emergent viewpoints, and takes upon situations. This is then very the world of the printed media, who will claim (in another act of mispresentation) that they ‘know’ what their readers are thinking or believing. A claim that of course conveys on certain newspapers a real demonic power of their own (as the political system appears to demand that politicians trust this democracy, the hold of the ‘the reader’ over the actual democracy of ballot box and vote!).
New media however, creates new communities – new ways of sharing. Here perhaps it is best to see two types emerging. On the one hand there is the sharing of things like Twitter or Facebook. One shares stuff, and then is evaluated by the reaction. The system is then very much in the shop window school of approval. One knows one is right (or at least feels value) because one goes ‘viral’. Ideas can then rip across the system and change everything – but this collectivism does not say anything about the actual value of this idea. It might just be a cod delusion. Except of course the very fact that it is shared and believed makes it powerful and so ‘believable’. One can then show one’s approval or not in this system only by ignoring a point of view or a page. On the other hand there is that world of crowd sourcing. Which is a world (in a way akin to the scientific world) shared with one’s fellows and one’s peers. As such it is endlessly improved and perfected. Ideas become then something for teams to developed and use. They become powerful not merely in their sharing as bits of information (true or false) but in their development, in the way that others take them and use them. The very collectivist nature of sharing becomes itself a place for creativity (as individuals take and envelope the idea differently).
Our society is then free as long as it is creating these endless new means of representation; means that almost by definition are not caught up in the conflicts and necessary pettiness of the world of party politics. It is no wonder then that ’proper’ government has had such a problematic relationship with these other democracies. Our freedom in a sense is tied up with that incomprehension. One wants the world of politics not to understand the creative world of other forms of sharing, for here our freedom lies as a nation. But this cuts both ways, for politics is brilliant at containing conflicts: It manages it in a grown up way that other communities can only dream of. If one then moves communities centre stage as it were, and takes them as the model, then one risks losing that ability to manage them. Or far worse one would be forced back on the old traditional and oppressive means to manage it. There is something sinister then in political parties wanting to learn from and organize communities. One can only hope that it is a cock up! One can only hope then that in the name of ‘managing the current crisis’ (or asserting copyright or whatever) large government does not seek to merge with the diversity of other voices. - So that we must fight for our right to remain a salmongundy, for there (as Kant knew so well) our freedom really lies.
