Portrait of the Regency Mind

  It was always a maxim of the Eighteenth Century that one ought to be careful whom one allowed to govern. To govern was and is such a tricky task, a task far beyond the common people. One needed then an aristocracy of rulers, that is a privileged caste, who knew themselves in some way to be the natural rulers of the nations (and were rewarded accordingly). Indeed the wealth of such people was almost a badge of their office, and a confirmation of their responsibility. The leader was one whose very wealth made them responsible. No aristocrat would have their portrait painted without all the badges of wig and robe, of office. At the same time, within this subset of the population,  reason and so full sovereignty were said to preside. If one was a ruler therefore, one ought not to be accountable to anyone beyond one’s own actions as one was that ruler. One might then face regular re-elections, and elections in which individuals chose between different rulers, but once one ruled, then one was sovereign. It was therefore up to this privileged group, the rulers, to make up their own rules and laws.

  The eighteenth century aristocrat ensured then that they were painted in front of their estate, the natural ruler: their expression likewise, would be designed to convey their reasonable nature. They were a ‘man of the Enlightenment’, a natural ruler blessed with superior reason and so with the right to govern. Our current trouble is that the portrait of opulent reason, is very much the portrait that modern politicians (and their apes the media) have in mind when they think about the constituting or indeed the very notion of rulership. We think in and attempt to squirt our modern minds into, the Eighteenth Century caste. We look then to fully sovereign rulers, who somehow are going to solve the problem. - Likewise we have in Parliament a fully sovereign body, one that ought not to be beholden to any other body, and yet ought still to be incorruptible (and the organ of reason) - for all that that parliamentary sovereignty was (and is) used as the excuse why politicians should have been allowed to police themselves. In the same way that Free Speech (that other Eighteenth Century holy cow) is used as the excuse for an aggressive and prurient media to say (or make up) what they choose.

  The real trouble is that then and now neither of these principles, leadership or reason (or free speech) were ever as simple as they looked in the books. In particular there was a habit (dating from the Seventeenth Century) to see these two principles as somehow opposed. One (as in oneself) was governed by reason, or by leaders, the former gave democracy, and latter, tyranny (good or bad), and that was it. And yet at all times and through all places they were always muddled up, and actually must be. Reason itself was always an amorphous principle. It needed, to operate well, parameters other than itself (that is a series of maxims and principles within which one innovated). The backdrop of rich houses was then the backdrop of reason. It was the necessary fabric within which reason (which partly rejected the picture, but only partly) thrived.

  This last fact then forms the backdrop of our more ‘democratic’ age. We might not be happy with creating or accepting an aristocracy based on wealth or accident, and yet we cannot have a democracy without creating an aristocracy of some kind of other. This fact of course lay right at the heart of the ‘Expenses Scandal’. The modern parliament was not drawn from natural aristocrats, and so needed to make its own. It did this in two main ways. On the one hand it allowed individuals to live like toffs, on expenses, and on the other it enshrouded their actions under a rubric of rules and procedures. The rules were archaic and served as the texture, the rule kit which enforced parameters upon individuals, and a series of shared assumptions, within which they could innovate, while the expense accounts allowed then those rulers to feel different, to feel like rulers (and, so the bad Eighteenth Century theory would have it) act independently of their electors.

  What is interesting about the recent scandal is that which of the Eighteenth Century we are still not questioning. MP’s are condemned for two reasons. One is allowing capitalism into the process; We do not mind you (as Cameron is) having a huge expense claim for a house you are living in (you can really claim for that country estate), but if you want to make a profit from it all, then we call you a criminal. You cannot then bring in the market into the business of being an aristocrat (what a great Eighteenth Century principle). But at the same time, one cannot be too trivial with one’s claims. One ought not to claim for that nitty gritty of being an aristocrat (follies or duck houses), but only for the broad brush of funding the estate. That is, it is not the taxpayer’s concern to fund individual peccadilloes of aristocrats, it merely ought to buy them their estates, and then let them get on with it! Hence it is a deep principle of reason, that an individual man’s taste is their own, but the right to use that taste belongs to us all (and so the state has a role in ensuring that rulers are in a position to satisfy the latter but not the former). 

  We thereby create a system where our rulers are given, on fine Eighteenth Century principles, the rights to live like landed earls (and do not the rest of us aspire to that much?). At the same time (once again in the best Eighteenth Century manner), we expect this group to behave according to the principles of a wider Reason. That is, they ought not to go mad, they ought to regulate themselves. What of course we mean by this is rather complex in itself. What we really mean is that expense accounts ought not to be used in a way that we (the people) could condemn if we knew about it (and were wound up enough about it). Being reasonable is then a matter of second guessing the population as a whole. Who would have predicted (save an Eighteenth Century historian) that we would not forgive a duck house (that cost relatively little), or a small scale reselling of property, but could forgive Cameron funding a mansion with his expense claim?

  In consequence, the very idea of parliament being fully sovereign because it should behave reasonably (and second guess the subsequent will of the population) was always, and at every point in democracy’s history, tricky. It always run up against that other Eighteenth Century principle - free speech. The problem being here that there were no clear rules. What others might allow or ignore and what they might condemn, was a movable feast. Free speech is in part the arbiter of that use. The system up to this point (from the Seventeenth Century onwards) was always to ensure that similar groups with similar perks were employed in the media, the civil service and parliament. There was a real vested interest in not attacking each other (a community of aristocrats) to stop the shit sticking also to oneself. One of the backdrops to the recent problems is no doubt that the media types, worried about their media organization’s future (and their own expense accounts) in the face of other cheaper ways to communicate information (like the internet), have decided that if their expense accounts are going down, then they will take the government’s with them. Or to put it slightly differently, if the modern democracy of the internet means that the expenses of journalists are looking increasingly unjustifiable, then these ‘other aristocrats’, will ensure that they use their ancient prerogative of free-speech, to similarly besmirch politicians. One terror leads to another, and all of a sudden we are in a blood both of aristocrats.

  But the extent of this blood both is only very slowly becoming clear, against the backdrop of rather a different Eighteenth Century story. This story had held that the natural rulers of the country were some kind of elite, which acted as a self-confirming guild, running the countryside. The modern equivalent has been the cult of ‘leaders’ (or as we call them CEO’s) that has spread through the country. All higher education establishments, as well as councils and big operations have these individuals. And the alleged ability of these individuals to turn around ‘failing’ institutions has become the stuff of legend and cult. In fact there has been over the last fifteen years or so, the strangest (and most old fashioned) of coups. The country (beyond Westimnister) is now run by a new collegiate body, the CEOs, whose shared experience, and language is meant to convey upon a whole variety of institutions, effective government. And yet of course herein lies the rub. The country does not feel particularly more effectively governed, merely more bureaucratic. The CEOs might of course (up until recently anyway) have argued that not rowing backwards in an increasingly complex world was (paradoxically) an advance, but it was never convincing, and is even less so now. Far more worryingly, this cult of individuality was built up in the presence of governments who were imposing artificial targets upon the population. The modern aristocrats, the well paid CEO’s, were then the ‘masters’, less of organizations and more of realizing (or appearing to realize) targets. Moreover their speciality was realizing these targets (irrespective of their worth) without upsetting too much of the top echelons of the organizations. One might bugger up the poor sods below without penalty.

  The effect of this target-based coup has not only been to change the nature of government, but also of the state. The state now rather directly wants to mould (though its targets) what is happening in the country (our modern aristocrats are ‘major generals’ in this respect). And yet of course it is never quite that simple, The targets and their enforcers (the regulation or ‘Off-‘ Bodies) are drawn up by individuals who are aware of how the current system is operating (and will of course have contact with the current CEOs operating it). Targets cease then to be abstracts, imposed from outside on the system (and according to simple popular demand) and become rather the translating of perceived popular demand (or that manufactured within the media anyway) into bite size managerial speak. They become then merely a set of targets, torn out of any context, for our modern aristocrats to realize. The trouble of course is, that politicians need targets that can be realized (and which they can feed to the media, claiming ’Job Done’). The result of course is that the entire system is warped into the meeting of these targets: Meeting them is the only goal of the CEOs (it is after all the sole justification of their calling).

  The problem then is not so much that the targets themselves are wrong, but rather that their imposition and necessary realization creates false euphoria within such organizations. They assume that if they are fulfilling the targets, then they are good, and can trumpet themselves as such. Goodness and fulfilling targets become one and the same thing, given in the same breath (as in the Eighteenth Century aristocrats were thought to somehow be more noble and a better quality of person).

  The problem then is that success has proved rather cheap and easy, in three main ways. Firstly for example, universities that increase student numbers, or fulfil certain rather false criteria, are allowed to claim that they are a success. And what is more they do so irrespective of the fact that the teaching which they do is lousy, the courses badly designed, and their overall organization lamentable. Secondly the very fact that there are targets then warps the system, as realizing them becomes the aim, to the cost of everything else. One might then educate individuals inappropriately, and doubly change what one is teaching to do so, but this does not matter so long as one fulfils the targets one is given. The result is of course that all sorts of covert changes end up occurring, ways to ensure success at any cost, and secretly. These ruses might in themselves be good, but the problem is that they remain hidden behind the targets, as a way to realize them effectively (and not something in themselves).

  Thirdly and most tragically of all, the effect of the artificially successful target has been to create a leadership blind to the actual reality of the situation. A reality that has seen the actual quality of teaching slip, and the real reason for universities pass away. There are simply better ways to educate now, and universities are an expensive luxury we do not need in this form at least. Obsessed as they are with targets, our modern aristocrats were as blind to their current reckoning as were their Eighteenth Century counterparts. Both sets of rulers were caught up in their own bubble of staged success and manufactured triumph, and quite unaware of the forces that were about to burst that bubble. In the Eighteenth Century this was of course revolution; while now it is the credit crunch and the fact that the country has very little money and almost (in spite of our education) very little way to easily make any money. The old days then of easy wealth funding a self-appointed and self-regulated system are over, and with it the salaries (and if we are lucky) the cheap success. The only real problem is that we, like our Eighteenth Century forebears, have very little idea of what to replace this aristocracy with, once it has been violently thrust aside. Here the problem is of course that this move is necessarily violent, a violence that prevents order or ease in the transition.

The Eighteenth Century portrait encapsulates reason and power in the single portrait: the man of reason was a man of wealth, and that was good and excellent. We carried on this idea for so long that we created artificial wealths (and artificial reason), as they created landscape gardens and manor houses. We created then a cult of the leader which has warped society, and its unpicking is proving as problematic as of old. The problem of how one moved from the staid top heavy model of Reason to the free form of the Romantics and allowed in other voices into government, other ways of thinking or being. is the problem we face now. The problem of how we, in the words Kant, finally learn to grow up as a species.