THE TURN TO THE RIGHT

Dick Pountain/Political Quarterly/12 December 2016 14:49

"The Shipwrecked Mind: On Political Reaction": by Mark Lilla
The New York Review of Books Inc (Oct 2016)
Soft cover, 176 pages


To call 2016 a catastrophic year for the worldwide Left would be an understatement. Britain's self-harming Brexit referendum and the USA's toxic (possibly Putinised) presidential election were only the most spectacular of the setbacks, with genocidal civil wars and anti-immigrant activism on the rise all over. Contrast with that period of hubristic optimism before the 2003 Iraq Invasion could hardly be more stark. George Bush's Caring Conservatives and Tony Blair's New Labour thought that together they could fix the Post-Cold-War world permanently for democracy and free markets, but those free markets (plus the immense war costs) lead directly to the financial crash of 2008, which lead to the austerity of 2010, which lead to the great "revolt of the left-behind" that Brexit and Trump represent. It turns out that a majority, admittedly narrow, of European and US populations now reject the cosmopolitanism and liberalism espoused by their political leaders and celebrity role-models.

To make headway against this tide of reaction, the Left needs to understand this mind-set rather than merely excoriating it as racist, sexist, homophobic and whatever. Such tutting and finger-wagging contributed significantly to the current ideological rout. Few scholars are better equipped to provide such understanding than Mark Lilla, Professor of Humanities at Columbia University New York. A political scientist and historian of ideas, Lilla has contributed many articles to the New York Review of Books analysing anti-Enlightenment and anti-Modern thought in religion and politics, and his latest volume "The Shipwrecked Mind" is built from expanded versions of several of these.

This reviewer first came across Lilla via his 1998 NYRB essay "A Tale of Two Reactions", while researching my book on the legacy of the '60s counter-culture. Lilla pondered the two revolutions that transformed post-war America, the 1960s "counter-cultural revolution" and Ronald Reagan's neoliberal economic revolution of the 1980s. He characterised both sides as "reactionary" in the strict sense of that term: the Right reacts ineffectually against the moral laxity of popular culture, while the Left reacts ineffectually against privatisation and market forces. But he also observed that young Americans appeared to have no difficulty reconciling the two positions by "holding down day jobs in the unfettered global economy while spending weekends immersed in a moral and cultural universe shaped by the Sixties". That remains largely true in Trump's America, except that those day jobs are harder to come by...

In "The Shipwrecked Mind" Lilla further dissects the reactionary impulse as displayed in the work of several 20th-century thinkers, some famous, others less so, most ignored by intellectual historians who find revolutionaries more interesting and sympathetic. Though his book was written well before Trump's victory, Lilla had already sensed the way the tide was running, that the media, internet and social networks were turning public opinion toward the right. He begins by clarifying an important point:

Reactionaries are not conservatives... They are, in their way, just as radical as revolutionaries and just as firmly in the grip of historical imaginings... The revolutionary sees the radiant future invisible to others and it electrifies him. The reactionary, immune to modern lies, sees the past in all its splendor and he too is electrified... His story begins with a happy, well-ordered state where people who know their place live in harmony and submit to tradition and their God. Then alien ideas promoted by intellectuals - writers, journalists, professors - challenge this harmony and the will to maintain order weakens at the top. (The betrayal of elites is the linchpin of every reactionary story)... Today political Islamists, European nationalists, and the American Right tell their ideological children essentially the same tale. The reactionary mind is a shipwrecked mind.

In his first section, "Thinkers", Lilla tackles three 20th-century philosophers: Franz Rosenzweig, Eric Voegelin and Leo Strauss. Rosenzweig was a scholar first of Hegel, then of Judaism, who rebelled against Hegelian reason and the "disenchantment of the world" in favour of religious revival. He called for a “battle for religion in the twentieth-century sense” in terms, ironically enough, very similar to those of his contemporary, the anti-semitic Martin Heidegger. Voegelin was German-born but raised and studied philosophy in Vienna. A 1924 fellowship in New York exposed him to the teaching of John Dewey at Columbia, and imbued him with a hatred of racism and totalitarianism that proved embarassing on his return to Austria: in 1938 he had to flee Nazi arrest back to the USA. His major works "The Political Religions" and "The New Science of Politics" attacked fascism, communism and nationalism, but blamed Western secularism for their rise and defended the utility of religion for keeping social order. This makes him popular with the US religious Right, though Lilla argues that they misunderstand him (he also blamed Christianity for the American Revolution!)

The best-known of the three is Leo Strauss, another gifted European philosopher who emigrated to America before WWII. Throughout the 1950s and '60s at the University of Chicago he mentored a whole generation of neo-conservatives in the art of political dissembling. We have him to thank, in part, for US foreign policy under Reagan and both Bushes. His muscular strain of Platonism emphasised the need for a two-level philosophy: a softened, highly-edited version of the world to placate the masses, and a hard, cold (and secret) true picture for their masters. The current furore over online False News might be seen as a Straussian legacy.

The second half of the book covers contemporary reactionary thinkers on both Right and Left. Brad Gregory's "The Unintended Reformation" is an exercise in counterfactual history, where he suggests that had the Pope's side won the 30 Years War, capitalism might have developed in a different, more humane direction, with less consumerism and moral relativism. Er, yes, perhaps... Lilla goes on to skilfully dissect the Swiss Talmud scholar Jacob Taubes, who started the cult of admiration for Nazi lawyer Carl Schmitt's work among European Left thinkers, then proceeds to Alain Badiou, who further exemplified such extraordinary intellectual gymnastics by moving seamlessly from Mao Tse Tung to St Paul as his preferred model of revolutionary fervour.

Lilla's last chapter analyses the Paris terrorist attacks of 2015 and their effect on French public opinion, through works by journalist Eric Zemmour and novelist Michel Houellebecq. A few months before the Paris attacks Zemmour published "Le Suicide Français", a tirade against the decline of France that became the second-best-selling book of 2014: not a simple racist of the Le Pen sort, Zemmour blames not just appeasement of Muslims but also the outsourcing, wage-cutting business classes and bankers. Houellebecq, perhaps France’s most important contemporary novelist, used to take a jaundiced, sub-situationist view of French consumer society, but his latest novel "Submission" changes tack with a plot about an Islamic political party coming to power in France in the near future and achieving popular support, thanks to a general decline of moral fibre wrought by secular consumerism. By a macabre coincidence it was published the morning of the Charlie Hebdo murders.

Following World War II social-democratic ideas enjoyed a certain hegemony on both sides of the Atlantic thanks to the experience of collective wartime effort. (That even included "wet" Tory governments and the pre-Tea Party GOP to some degree). The 1960s counter-culture dented this hegemony through unrealistic and anachronistic revolutionary posturing, and so it was that on achieving office Margaret Thatcher could denounce the hegemony as "the ratchet of socialism". Between them the Thatcher and Reagan administrations inaugurated a devastatingly effective counter-attack, by playing on popular emotions, the prejudices and fears caused by rapid social change, and by ridiculing the moralising "political correctness" of the New Left. The ideas Mark Lilla examines in this book all contributed to this gradual, drip-by-drip process of undermining the post-war progressive mindset. As he puts it "for an ideology to really reshape politics it must cease being a set of principles and become instead a vaguer general outlook that new information and events only strengthen. You really know when an ideology has matured when every event, present and past, is taken as confirmation of it". That's where we appear now to be with Brexit and Trump.

A PENNY FOR YOUR THOUGHTS

Dick Pountain/Political Quarterly/The Knowledge Corrupters/13 May 2016 10:19

"The Knowledge Corrupters: Hidden Consequences of the Financial Takeover of Public Life" by Colin Crouch

Polity Press (Cambridge 2015)

Soft cover, 182 pages

ISBN 9780745669854"

"The Knowledge Corrupters" opens with an example of a truly perverse incentive – the 2014 revelation that the NHS was paying doctors £55 for every patient they diagnosed as suffering from dementia. Inadequate diagnosis of dementia had become a political hot potato, hence this modern solution: pay 'em to find more. Colin Crouch observes that this should surprise no-one because "That as much of life as possible should be reduced to market exchanges, and therefore to money values, is one of the main messages of the most influential political and economic ideology of today's world, neoliberalism."

That very word is currently site of a skirmish in the civil war for the soul of the Labour Party. A December 2015 editorial in the Blairite magazine Progress condemned the term neoliberalism as "lazy use of language" and "a catch-all for anyone with whom you disagree", but since it's mostly Corbynistas who use it against Blairites this was a predictable defensive parry. It's nevertheless true that, as a shorthand for the newly aggressive capitalism we've suffered since the late 1980s, the word is at risk of demotion to a status like that of "fascist" – a loosely-defined insult only vaguely connected to its proper historical meaning. Colin Crouch would be the last person in the world to use the term carelessly: his three previous books "Post-democracy" (2005), "The Strange Non-death of Neoliberalism" (2011) and "Making Capitalism Fit for Society" (2013) contained masterly analyses of the crisis of 20th-century social democracy and its ongoing struggle with the neoliberal reaction.

Crouch regards neoliberalism not as an alien imposition, to be eliminated by return to some improbable variant of state socialism, but as a permanent feature of the political landscape, an inevitable response to social democracies that had become ossified, conservative, protectionist: no longer capable of dealing with the globalised power of multinational corporations and demands for choice from affluent consumers. For him a "mixed economy" means not just separate public and private employment sectors but also corresponding social-democratic and neoliberal ideological sectors, locked in permanent struggle for territory and even capable of mutual influence. The neoliberal Old Testament is Friedrich Hayek's 1943 work "The Road To Serfdom", which proclaimed that the market is a repository of superior wisdom which "renders all human attempts to second-guess it through the use of expertise imposed on its outcomes as necessarily inferior". Against communism, social democracy and fascism, Hayek and colleagues claimed that all attempts at planning were potentially totalitarian. During the economic instability that followed the 1970's Oil Crisis some conservative thinkers dared to resurrect this belief, electoral victories by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher enthroned it as the alternative to Keynesian demand management, which forced "Third Way" politicians like Clinton and Blair to entrench it as the new orthodoxy.

Crouch's new book focuses on one specific problem, the concerted attempts by neoliberal agents to restrict and corrupt the dissemination of information, by attacking the status of knowledge professionals and expert advice itself. His first chapter explores neoliberalism as a theory of knowledge, and claims that these attacks erode the feedback mechanisms necessary for democratic governance of modern technological, knowledge-based societies, thus becoming a threat to democracy itself.

Neoliberalism's current assault against the public realm goes by the name of New Public Management (NPM), the doctrine that all public services must behave as though they were in the private sector. NPM first emerged under Thatcher, but was enthusiastically extended by New Labour and continues under Cameron/Osborne. In Chapter 2, "The Corrosion of the Public-Service Ethos" Crouch explains that though proponents can portray this doctrine as democratic and anti-elitist – a cure for the blundering of planners which encourages experts to evolve and improve their skills through market exposure – it also masks a darker, populist belief that people who aren't motivated by profit must automatically be considered lazier and less competent than those who are. This belief prevails among most businesses and throughout our current Tory administration, and it demands several kinds of remedy: privatise whatever can be privatised; outsource all regulation by public professionals to private agencies; set performance targets and assessment regimes for those public professionals who had hitherto been self-governing.

Outsourcing forces public service professionals into closer contact with business, supposedly to teach them efficiency through competition but in practice encouraging corruption by breaking down firewalls deliberately erected after long experience (for example school inspectors or credit rating agencies). Performance targets are the neoliberal's way of evaluating services to which a monetary value can't be directly attached. They are meant to imitate the way businesses choose product lines, but in complex activities like healthcare, education and policing it's not possible for politicians to know which are the most significant aspects of performance to target. The result is dangerous over-simplification that undermines the accumulated knowledge and expertise of the service providers. Providers are also provoking into spending time gaming the targets that could have been spent providing service.

School and university reforms offer grim examples of this kind of interference, as does the police force. When opinion polls suggested that burglary and car theft most influenced public perception of the crime rate, targets were imposed to prioritise those crimes at the expense of police efforts against other areas, like child abuse. Hence new scandals, targets reset, narrow spotlight shone onto newly-crucial areas, a state of perpetual re-re-reform. Crouch calls this kind of excessive politicisation "hyper-democracy": when there are few major policy disagreements between main parties, they explore ever finer levels of detail to promote as distinctive policy, which further sidelines and undermines the knowledge of practitioners on the ground in favour of bright ideas from political ideologues.

Crouch condenses his arguments into five major points, which are:

1) Forcing public services into markets encourages them to over-simplify the knowledge that they demand, and undermines the professionals who create and deliver that knowledge.

2) Though markets do indeed concentrate certain kinds of knowledge, as Hayek claimed, over-reliance on them undermines other forms of knowledge, including science.

3) For earlier free-market theorists like Adam Smith it was axiomatic that market participants would behave with moral integrity, but contemporary Rational Choice theory actually exalts and rewards dishonesty and the corruption of knowledge.

4) Pure market theory presupposes an economy with many producers and consumers, but today's neoliberals tolerate high degrees of monopoly and often permit corporate elites to restrict access to and distort knowledge in their corporate interest (Crouch calls this "corporate neoliberalism").

5) To act fully effectively in a market demands amoral, calculating and self-centred behaviour. As one small component of a total personality this may be tolerable, but as markets spread into ever more areas of life it tends to coarsen us all into calculating machines.

He illustrates these points with copious real-world examples drawn from contemporary affairs and scandals, far too many to catalogue in this short review: suffice to say they include: BP's Deepwater Horizon oil spill; the 2011 Japanese tsunami and nuclear meltdown; the Greek bail-out; PPI mis-selling; climate-change science; food nutrition labelling; the Libor, Euribor and Forex fiddling scandals; school GCSE performance indicators (gaming of); university impact targets; PFI building programmes; Big Pharma's suppression of adverse test results; G4S and Serco prisoner tagging scandals; HMRC's leniency to rich tax evaders, and much, much more.

Central to Crouch's critique is a distinction between three different conceptions of the consumer of goods and services: as citizen, as customer or as object. Citizens have rights to participate in discussion and decision-making, rather than merely to consume services. Customers have the capacity to choose to pay for different goods and services in a marketplace. Objects are mere statistics, passive recipients of whatever is offered to them. Neoliberals charge social democracy with reducing people to objects without choices, and preach privatisation to promote them to customers. Crouch agrees with the diagnosis but not the treatment, and would instead promote them to full citizens.

His conclusion is that we can't avoid depending upon markets that will always give suppliers the incentive to ignore important information or to deceive us, upon professionals who don't merit the trust we can't avoid placing in them, and upon politicians who exaggerate both problems to enhance their own power. The solutions he proposes are not such as to set one's pulse racing: more and better inspection regimes and more participation (that is, two-way communication between professionals and their citizen/users).

In fact these prescriptions are both hard to achieve and highly political. Inspectors must again be experts in their field (rather than price-cutting private agencies) which is expensive, and they must be freed from both political and commercial pressures. The recent furore over the BBC's charter renewal shows how political this can become. As for participation, the problem is a gross asymmetry of knowledge and educational level between expert and typical user. The neoliberal solution is to interpose a middle layer of advisory services, often via websites supported by advertising, which merely displaces the problem of trust onto these advice services and so is no solution. Colin Crouch is not entirely pessimistic, observing that in the UK at least strong public support for the welfare state persists, and that the assaults have not so far actually diminished the expert skills required for education and medicine – but for how long?

USER MANUAL FOR A PLANET

Dick Pountain/ Political Quarterly/ 10th Jan 2016

"The Age of Sustainable Development" by Jeffrey Sachs

Columbia University Press (2015)

Soft cover, 544 pages

The extreme weather of December 2015, with floods across Northern Britain and lethal tornadoes in Texas, felt like a possible tipping point in the debate over the reality of climate change. Assuming the Democrats win the next US election – and if they don't, all bets are off – then politicians might turn their minds to tackling the looming climate crisis. Then Jeffrey Sachs' sumptuous tome "The Age of Sustainable Development" would be a good thing to keep at their elbow.

Excessive deference by politicians to the opinion of economists is an intellectual pathology of our times: the debacle over Greek debt and default showed us pretty convincingly where the power now lies. This phenomenon is referred to by Left commentators as neo-liberalism – giving priority to market forces over humane, planned policies – and that the Labour Party's Blairite rump has taken to deprecating use of the term suggests it still has some traction. For those who oppose neo-liberal austerity policies the options are limited, since state socialism has failed comprehensively wherever tried and is no longer saleable. Neo-Keynesian policies of various strengths alone retain any political credibility, and so a generation of neo-Keynesian economists, notably Paul Krugman, Joseph Stiglitz and Robert Reich, now makes most of the running (somewhat surprisingly from the USA). These economists seek to defend the political against neo-liberal budgetary superstitions, and promote expansionary policies on the reasonable assumption that putting money back into people's pockets stimulates demand and restores a virtuous growth cycle. And then there is Jeffrey Sachs...

Currently Columbia's professor of sustainable development and director of its Earth Institute, Sachs is indeed another Keynesian macroeconomist, but rather different from the other stars of the "Keynesian Resurgence" that followed the 2008 crash. Adviser to the Russian, Polish, Slovenian and Estonian governments during their transition from Communism, he promoted what then amounted to neo-liberal privatisation plans. He's more interested in ameliorating world poverty than in US Democratic Party policy, does work for both the IMF and the United Nations, and has been special adviser to UN Secretaries Kofi Annan and Ban Ki-Moon. Such a CV could tempt one lazily to classify Sachs as a "Right" rather than "Left" Keynesian, but on the evidence of this book that would be short-sighted.

In reviewing "The Age of Sustainable Development" it's hard to resist first remarking its arresting, supra-commercial production standards. Published by Columbia University Press with a foreword by Ban Ki-Moon, it's printed on the finest matte-coated paper with full-colour graphs, maps, diagrams or photographs on over half its 544 pages (and a fiendishly clever metallised photo cover). Such luxury might further stamp Sach's project as "Establishment", but that would again be lazy. He's written a clear, well-organized and non-polemical account of the number and the immensity of challenges that we face, and the sheer inadequacy of current governmental responses to them, aimed at nothing less than a prescription for eliminating world poverty by enabling and encouraging developing nations to catch up with Western standards of health, education and life-chances, in ways compatible with reducing the threat of anthropogenic climate change.

Sachs bases his approach on the science of complex systems, seeking to understand the world as "a complex interaction of economic, social, environmental and political systems”. This leads him continually to cross boundaries between disciplines that normally share neither a common language nor way of thinking, a style that's reminiscent of certain other systems thinkers like Vaclav Smil. This he calls "clinical economics", a discipline intended to advise and encourage "governments, experts and civil society to undertake the 'differential diagnoses' necessary to overcome remaining obstacles". Many such differential diagnoses inform both this book and the UN's Millenium Development Goals (MDGs), of which Sachs was chief strategist. The key word is "differential", as his method involves separately analysing each country, even region, to take account of its history, ethnic culture, religion, ideology and other factors that have altered the course of its development. He claims that failure to perform such differential analysis is what causes so much foreign aid to be wasted, and so many humanitarian endeavours to produce perverse results (the invasion of Iraq springs to mind).

The argument is unfolded in a highly-structured manner, first refining the big goal of sustainable development into three subgoals, economic development, social inclusion and environmental sustainability, then further subdividing and expanded these over 14 fact-crammed chapters. There's far too much detail to even attempt a summary here, and the excellent maps, graphs and diagrams are crucial to following the argument. As an example Chapter 3, "A Brief History Of Economic Development" is a succinct, multi-causal account of the rise of Western capitalism, viewed from cultural, religious, political and geographic dimensions. Chapter 4 "Why Some Countries Developed While Others Stayed Poor" outlines the obstacles to development, which include:

~ the "poverty trap": countries too poor to make basic investments

~ mistaken economic policy

~ financially insolvent governments

~ physical geography: far from trade routes because landlocked or in high mountains

~ bad governance

~ cultural barriers like the subjugation of women

~ geopolitics: wars with neighbours or colonising powers

The other twelve chapters cover the whole gamut of environmental challenge, from poverty, over-population, loss of habitat and species extinction, to overextraction of resources, disrupted nutrient cycles, urbanization, social mobility, climate change and, most importantly, the way all these problems interact, feed back and amplify one another. Sustainable development is “inherently an exercise in problem solving" and Sachs is a techno-optimist who believes that it's possible, in theory, to retain some economic progress of a reformed, sustainable kind that will allow the developing world to catch up. His optimism is neither blind nor irrational, based in part on the Soviet economist Nikolai Kondratiev's theory of "waves" of technological advance that drive the world economy: from steam engines, railways and steel, through electrification, chemicals and automobiles, to the digital revolution. Sachs believes the next wave will be a "sustainability revolution" based on nanotechnology, smarter agriculture, renewable energy sources and huge efficiency gains made possible by new, cheap digital control systems.

Sachs embraces nuclear power in addition to renewable energy sources, and believes it possible that the poorest countries can catch up, assuming sacrifices by affluent Western populations that will be real, but perhaps no worse than those about to be inflicted on them by the cupidity of the oligarchic "1%". Swedish population scientist Hans Rosling, in his brilliant documentary "Don't Panic", visualised the way the top octile (by income) of the world's population emits half the carbon dioxide, a proportion that halves again for each succeeding lower octile, which has twofold implications: the very poorest populations have plenty of room to grow themselves out of poverty without disastrously affecting the outcome, but equally, combating global warming becomes overwhelmingly our, Western, responsibility. Similar calculations about inequality suggest that we top 10% also need to shrug off neo-liberal policies before we start berating the poorest nations for corruption. Both Sachs and Rosling have noticed, unlike more radical alarmists, that developing-world fertility is already falling so steeply that population growth will level out this century.

To ask whether Sachs is of the Left, Right or Centre is moot, since all his prescriptions demand deep collaboration between a strong civil society and a strong, honest, state. He's a Bernsteinian social democrat in effect, if not in name: "Even when the financing is strictly within the private sector, a proper regulatory framework and corrective measures are very important to make sure that the private sector is investing in the right areas and is driven by market signals that are giving accurate indicators of overall social costs and social benefits." He's not a pious liberal interventionist who seeks to impose democracy by decree: development in the absence of democracy (as in China) is still a goal, with some hope it may lead to democracy later. Nor is he a utopian, being acutely aware of the many obstacles to achieving these goals.

And the obstacles are almost insurmountably severe: oligarchic vested interests; climate-change-denying US Republicans; Islamists who obstruct the emancipation of women (and the reduced fertility it brings); anti-state libertarians, like those Silicon Valley billionaires who think it more fun to colonise Mars than save this planet; neo-nationalists and racists who degrade our political discourse; and the reluctance of Western populations to sacrifice any comfort. Sachs also retains too much, possibly misplaced, faith in the integrity of international banks and UN aid institutions. What's worse, the degradation of politics is now proceeding at such a pace that even a book published in 2015 looks out-of-date regarding the perils: Sachs devotes little space to the Middle East, with neither Syria nor Iraq appearing in the index, and the current refugee crisis was barely starting when he wrote it.

Even so, and dauntingly dense though it is, reading this book will leave you as well-informed as anyone about the scale of our problems and their possible solutions, if not about the politics needed to achieve them. The beautifully-designed volume is indispensable for anyone who believes, however timidly, that sanity might one day prevail. It's a user manual for running a planet sustainably, the trouble being that a manual is seldom what people reach for first when smoke and flames start coming out of the box....