Thursday, March 27, 2014
Liberal Societies and Technocracies and Where We Stand
I get a bit annoyed when people on the good guy's side sloppily adopt the EU's description of their own bureaucratic method of ruling us - "Technocracy"
Now to call either Kinnock, Baroso, Mandelson, or any of the rest of them a "technologist" with "knowledge, expertise or skill" beyond the skills required of windbags and fraudsters is clearly nonsense. I doubt if any of them can handle machinery much more complicated than a knife and fork.
China and Singapore probably can be correctly classified as technocracies. China's leaders almost all have engineering &/or accountancy credentials. Singapore's ruling party goes to considerable lengths to ensure anybody carrying their rosette has technocratic ability & the results and people's votes suggest this works (China's is more debatable - the people are probably fairly happy with the government but we don't know because they aren't asked).
There is a good case for genuine technocratic government. Democracy does have the problem that those elected are fairly representative of the electorate, almost 50% of whom are of below average intelligence. On the other hand rule by elites has the problem that they have their own interests and beliefs rather than all of societies as their prime interest. Also that after a generation or 2 they may be much less elite.
But what we have running the EU (and to an ever increasing extent at home too) has none of the benefits of either democracy or technocracy while keeping the dis-benefits of both.
People of no exceptional intelligence running things without considering us, just as if they were an elite.
A few days ago I mentioned the SNP's childcare policy being an invented PR lie masquerading as a carefully costed policy. Well in a follow up to that the SNP have, typically, refused to answer an FoI on the matter for this amazing reason:
Which is simply a boast that the SNP think that, under no circumstances, should the mere public have any knowledge of the formation of new polices, and thus by definition no influence. It should, ideally, emerge like Aphrodite, from the furrowed brow of Sturgeon, Salmond or the rest of these intellectual pigmies. It doesn't really matter whether this reason is the genuine one or just something thought up as an excuse to hide the lack of anything behind the curtain to support the policy. If they believe it or if they believe it is a sensible excuse, they must believe it.
It is not just the SNP, of course, who believe no idea should be considered ever, under any circumstances, be willing to look at any new ideas that don't come from party leaders, which obviously is a tight limit.
So here is the alternative - Dan Hannan on why a free society with the rule of law applied equally and lightly, to all, which often but not automatically means a democracy & definitely something that EU "technocrats" don't even understand.
"Most Brits do indeed believe in British exceptionalism. But here's the thing: They define it in almost exactly the same way that Americans do. British exceptionalism, like its American cousin, has traditionally been held to reside in a series of values and institutions: personal liberty, free contract, jury trials, uncensored newspapers, regular elections, habeas corpus, open competition, secure property, religious pluralism.
"The concept of a technocracy remains mostly hypothetical, though some nations have been considered as such in the sense of being governed primarily by technical experts in various fields of governmental decision making. A technocrat has come to mean either 'a member of a powerful technical elite', or 'someone who advocates the supremacy of technical experts'.[1][2][3] Scientists, engineers, and technologists examples include these technologists who have knowledge, expertise, or skills, would compose the governing body, instead of politicians, businesspeople, and economists.[4] In a technocracy, decision makers would be selected based upon how knowledgeable and skillful they are in their field." (definition from Wikipedia)
Now to call either Kinnock, Baroso, Mandelson, or any of the rest of them a "technologist" with "knowledge, expertise or skill" beyond the skills required of windbags and fraudsters is clearly nonsense. I doubt if any of them can handle machinery much more complicated than a knife and fork.
China and Singapore probably can be correctly classified as technocracies. China's leaders almost all have engineering &/or accountancy credentials. Singapore's ruling party goes to considerable lengths to ensure anybody carrying their rosette has technocratic ability & the results and people's votes suggest this works (China's is more debatable - the people are probably fairly happy with the government but we don't know because they aren't asked).
There is a good case for genuine technocratic government. Democracy does have the problem that those elected are fairly representative of the electorate, almost 50% of whom are of below average intelligence. On the other hand rule by elites has the problem that they have their own interests and beliefs rather than all of societies as their prime interest. Also that after a generation or 2 they may be much less elite.
But what we have running the EU (and to an ever increasing extent at home too) has none of the benefits of either democracy or technocracy while keeping the dis-benefits of both.
People of no exceptional intelligence running things without considering us, just as if they were an elite.
A few days ago I mentioned the SNP's childcare policy being an invented PR lie masquerading as a carefully costed policy. Well in a follow up to that the SNP have, typically, refused to answer an FoI on the matter for this amazing reason:
"Disclosing this advice and evidence while the childcare policy is still under discussion and development may undermine or constrain the Government's ability to develop that policy effectively."
Which is simply a boast that the SNP think that, under no circumstances, should the mere public have any knowledge of the formation of new polices, and thus by definition no influence. It should, ideally, emerge like Aphrodite, from the furrowed brow of Sturgeon, Salmond or the rest of these intellectual pigmies. It doesn't really matter whether this reason is the genuine one or just something thought up as an excuse to hide the lack of anything behind the curtain to support the policy. If they believe it or if they believe it is a sensible excuse, they must believe it.
It is not just the SNP, of course, who believe no idea should be considered ever, under any circumstances, be willing to look at any new ideas that don't come from party leaders, which obviously is a tight limit.
So here is the alternative - Dan Hannan on why a free society with the rule of law applied equally and lightly, to all, which often but not automatically means a democracy & definitely something that EU "technocrats" don't even understand.
"Most Brits do indeed believe in British exceptionalism. But here's the thing: They define it in almost exactly the same way that Americans do. British exceptionalism, like its American cousin, has traditionally been held to reside in a series of values and institutions: personal liberty, free contract, jury trials, uncensored newspapers, regular elections, habeas corpus, open competition, secure property, religious pluralism.
The conceit of our era is to assume that these ideals are somehow the natural condition of an advanced society—that all nations will get around to them once they become rich enough and educated enough. In fact, these ideals were developed overwhelmingly in the language in which you are reading these words. You don't have to go back very far to find a time when freedom under the law was more or less confined to the Anglosphere: the community of English-speaking democracies.
.... The spread of "Western" values was, in truth, a series of military victories by the Anglosphere.
I realize that all this might seem strange to American readers. Am I not diluting the uniqueness of the U.S., the world's only propositional state, by lumping it in with the rest of the Anglosphere? Wasn't the republic founded in a violent rejection of the British Empire? Didn't Paul Revere rouse a nation with his cry of "the British are coming"?
Actually, no. That would have been a remarkably odd thing to yell at a Massachusetts population that had never considered itself anything other than British (what the plucky Boston silversmith actually shouted was "The regulars are coming out!"). The American Founders were arguing not for the rejection but for the assertion of what they took to be their birthright as Englishmen.....
What made the Anglosphere different? Foreign visitors through the centuries remarked on a number of peculiar characteristics: the profusion of nonstate organizations, clubs, charities and foundations; the cheerful materialism of the population; the strong county institutions, including locally chosen law officers and judges; the easy coexistence of different denominations (religious toleration wasn't unique to the Anglosphere, but religious equality—that is, freedom for every sect to proselytize—was almost unknown in the rest of the world). They were struck by the weakness, in both law and custom, of the extended family, and by the converse emphasis on individualism. They wondered at the stubborn elevation of private property over raison d'état, of personal freedom over collective need.
Many of them, including Tocqueville and Montesquieu, connected the liberty that English-speakers took for granted to geography. Outside North America, most of the Anglosphere is an extended archipelago: Great Britain, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong, Singapore, the more democratic Caribbean states. North America, although not literally isolated, was geopolitically more remote than any of them, "kindly separated by nature and a wide ocean," as Jefferson put it in his 1801 inaugural address, "from the exterminating havoc [of Europe]."
Isolation meant that there was no need for a standing army in peacetime, which in turn meant that the government had no mechanism for internal repression. When rulers wanted something, usually revenue, they had to ask nicely, by summoning people's representatives in an assembly. It is no coincidence that the world's oldest parliaments—England, Iceland, the Faroes, the Isle of Man—are on islands.
Above all, liberty was tied up with something that foreign observers could only marvel at: the miracle of the common law. Laws weren't written down in the abstract and then applied to particular disputes; they built up, like a coral reef, case by case. They came not from the state but from the people. The common law wasn't a tool of government but an ally of liberty: It placed itself across the path of the Stuarts and George III; it ruled that the bonds of slavery disappeared the moment a man set foot on English soil.
There was a fashion for florid prose in the 18th century, but the second American president, John Adams, wasn't exaggerating when he identified the Anglosphere's beautiful, anomalous legal system—which today covers most English-speaking countries plus Israel, almost an honorary member of the club, alongside the Netherlands and the Nordic countries—as the ultimate guarantor of freedom: "The liberty, the unalienable, indefeasible rights of men, the honor and dignity of human nature... and the universal happiness of individuals, were never so skillfully and successfully consulted as in that most excellent monument of human art, the common law of England."
Freedom under the law is a portable commodity, passed on through intellectual exchange rather than gene flow. Anyone can benefit from constitutional liberty simply by adopting the right institutions and the cultural assumptions that go with them. The Anglosphere is why Bermuda is not Haiti, why Singapore is not Indonesia, why Hong Kong is not China—and, for that matter, not Macau. As the distinguished Indian writer Madhav Das Nalapat, holder of the Unesco Peace Chair, puts it, the Anglosphere is defined not by racial affinity but "by the blood of the mind."
At a time when most countries defined citizenship by ancestry, Britain was unusual in developing a civil rather than an ethnic nationality. The U.S., as so often, distilled and intensified a tendency that had been present in Great Britain, explicitly defining itself as a creedal polity: Anyone can become American simply by signing up to the values inherent in the Constitution.
There is, of course, a flip-side. If the U.S. abandons its political structures, it will lose its identity more thoroughly than states that define nationality by blood or territory. Power is shifting from the 50 states to Washington, D.C., from elected representatives to federal bureaucrats, from citizens to the government. As the U.S. moves toward European-style health care, day care, college education, carbon taxes, foreign policy and spending levels, so it becomes less prosperous, less confident and less free.
We sometimes talk of the English-speaking nations as having a culture of independence. But culture does not exist, numinously, alongside institutions; it is a product of institutions. People respond to incentives. Make enough people dependent on the state, and it won't be long before Americans start behaving and voting like…well, like Greeks.
Which brings us back to Mr. Obama's curiously qualified defense of American exceptionalism. Outside the Anglosphere, people have traditionally expected—indeed, demanded—far more state intervention. They look to the government to solve their problems, and when the government fails, they become petulant.
That is the point that much of Europe has reached now. Greeks, like many Europeans, spent decades increasing their consumption without increasing their production. They voted for politicians who promised to keep the good times going and rejected those who argued for fiscal restraint. Even now, as the calamity overwhelms them, they refuse to take responsibility for their own affairs by leaving the euro and running their own economy. It's what happens when an electorate is systematically infantilized.
The owl of Minerva, wrote Hegel, spreads its wings only with the gathering of the dusk. Since the middle of the 18th century, the hegemony of the English-speaking peoples has drawn many other nations into a uniquely free, democratic and wealthy world order. The Anglo-American imperium is, by most measures, reaching its twilight. But the values of the Anglosphere, particularly the unique emphasis on individualism, ought to be perfectly suited to the Internet age. And such values can take root anywhere.
Perhaps the most important geopolitical question of the 21st century is this: Will India define itself primarily as a member of the Anglosphere or as an Asian power? In the decades after independence, India did what all former colonies do, adopting policies aimed at underlining its differences from the former occupier. Successive governments promoted autarky, the Hindi language and equidistance between the Western and Soviet blocs.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Winston Churchill on board the HMS Prince of Wales, August 1941 Hulton Archive/Getty Images
But India has long since passed its moment of maximum orbital distance from the other Anglophone democracies. The traits that continue to set it apart from most of its neighbors are, for want of a better shorthand, Anglosphere characteristics.
In India, governments come and go as the result of elections, without anyone being exiled or shot. The armed forces stay out of politics. English is the language of government and of most universities and businesses. Property rights and free contract are secured by a common-law system, which remains open to individuals seeking redress. Shared values lead to shared habits. When, in the aftermath of the tsunami 10 years ago, the U.S., Australian and Indian navies coordinated the relief effort, they found an interoperability that goes beyond even that found among NATO allies.
If India were to take its place at the heart of a loose Anglosphere network, based on free trade and military alliance, the future would suddenly look a great deal brighter. Of course, to join such a free trade area, the U.K. and Ireland would have to leave the EU. But that's another story"
Labels: British politics, EU, Rise of modern fascism
