God Save the Queen

Patient diplomacy

...but from a man who meant business. David Adesnik takes us behind the scenes of a democratic transition process. It remakes the point that one can only start to understand anything twenty years after it's happened.

Matthew 25: 14-30

Via The Glittering Eye, a historical reminder: today is the anniversary of the birth of Ulysses S. Grant, consecutively drunken failure, commander of the Federal armies in the latter stages of the American Civil War, and President. He was extremely good at being a drunken failure, which would normally have disqualified him from any higher post.

War brings odd opportunities, and Grant turned out to have a way to win the war when a succession of apparently smarter men (think McClellan, Hooker) had failed. Grant's life always seemed to me to argue against the logic of the rich man in the parable of the talents: being capable in one job doesn't mean being capable the next rung up the ladder. What is odder, being inept at following doesn't need to mean being hopeless at leading.

Childish things

Chrenkoff notes in this post how Putin might be a moderniser without being a liberaliser. He's probably right, and right to put him in with Peter the Great et al. But this isn't only a Russian phenomenon: a lot of people outside the West have historically looked at our technology - steamships and railways once upon a time, nuclear weapons and jet fighters nowadays - and thought they were the source of our strength. Nasser did it, Saddam and Kaiser Bill and the Japanese militarists of the 1930s did it, and more others than I can count. But our strength is in our free institutions, not in our toys, and there's a word for the kind of small persons who allow themselves to be impressed with toys.

The time came when Germany and Japan had to put aside childish things, and so will the rest. Chrenkoff is very quotable: "In doing so, they confuse the causes and consequences of the West's success and are thus bound to be disappointed, but not without a lot of heartache and disruption."
Childish beliefs, in a world with nuclear weapons, can't be allowed to survive.

Dodgy metaphor post

Once there was a tree in a back garden. The inhabitants of the house knew that there was something wrong with it, since some of its branches were withered or diseased. But they couldn’t agree on what to do about it.

One said: ‘scientists have looked into this problem. Dr. Smith has said that the diseased branches are that way because most of the xylem cells inside the trunk are dead. We must get them out, we need to do major surgery on the tree.’

Another replied: ‘But Professor Jones says it’s normal for a tree trunk to be mostly made up of dead cells. They may be dead but they’re still performing an essential function by providing structural support. In any case, the dead cells and the living ones are so tightly bound up together that you couldn’t get rid of the dead cells without destroying a lot of the living ones.’

However, it was pointed out that this position was not radical and bold; indeed, it was possibly not even modern. And so the surgery was done, and the inhabitants of the house were very upset when what was left of the tree collapsed onto their kitchen.

I’m afraid we’ve wandered off into the familiar territory of conservative metaphor-mongering. 'We did it before, and can do it again': true, but it wasn't very pretty or indeed at all democratic last time. I recently read Veronica Wedgwood's fine book The Trial of Charles I which makes it fairly clear that the execution of the King, however necessary we can see it to be in retrospect, was very unpopular and would not have happened without a military coup in December 1648.

So: these are some further reflections on the question of why it makes sense to retain the monarchy, inspired by reflection on the preferred metaphors of the various traditions of Western political thought since the Enlightenment. ‘Supports’, as used in VS’ original post, is an architectural metaphor of the type beloved of socialists, Marxists and radicals. The other popular metaphors are the mechanical and organic.

–        architectural metaphors – such as ‘superstructure' and 'foundations’ - imply that society should be viewed as humanly created or artificial and static. Society should therefore be relatively easy to change, with little risk of unplanned consequences, provided that buttressing is in place (a relatively simple procedure). Furthermore, the existing building must have no essential change from the original building: hence its faults are the same now as in the past. It’s therefore by implication just to correct past injustice by punishing the present-day descendants of the original builders or architects.

-         mechanical metaphors – in which society and the economy are viewed as a type of machine. This metaphor is implicit in the idea of ‘piecemeal social engineering’ - Popper’s idea, essentially the animating spirit of both parties in the reformist-liberal post-war consensus. (Several unargued points there, apologies: I think the post-war consensus was liberal in the modern sense though plainly not in the C19 sense. Was Popper a liberal? A reformer, at any rate; Brian Magee thought his views were consistent with social democracy – which I take to be practically indistinguishable from Hobhouse’s welfare liberalism.) This metaphor leads to a fundamentally scientific and rational approach to social change, i.e. that change must assume that human beings are ultimately rational – a leap of faith.

    Under the spell of this metaphor, society must be viewed as something that could in principle be stopped for repairs, in which it’s possible to replace one faulty part without too many knock-on effects or unintended consequences (depending on the part in question). Thus, the results of our actions are somewhat predictable, if rather more risky and fiddly than with a building – there is limited but in principle controllable unpredictability.

(I wouldn't make too much of this, since there is no single thinker as overwhelmingly important to liberals as Marx is to socialists. I've barely scratched the surface of a big subject, and hardly touched on many aspects of political metaphor which are discussed here, for example.)

-         organic (conservative) metaphors are perhaps most familiar. Society is seen as a living thing with no direct human creator: follows own laws and urges, has own dynamic and a capacity for self-adjustment and repair. Therefore it’s not merely dependent on external command & control. Furthermore, actions affecting one part will affect most other parts: there is deep unpredictability.

The great value of monarchy (apart from the reasons I gave in my debut post) is that it provides a basically innocuous focus for irrationalism. I don’t believe that it is a main cause of irrationalism, which is innate and irreducible (plenty of room for reasonable people to disagree on that point, of course, but I submit that our views on the fundamental rationality of humanity are ultimately grounded in faith – which is perhaps a bootstraps argument for those who believe in fundamental irrationalism! Sorry, that’s naughty of me).

Evidence for the irreducibility of irrationalism is everywhere, though. Republics have plenty of alternative fetishes – cf. France, the USA, Germany – they have (in no particular order) nationalism, racism, la gloire, laicite, guns, psychotherapy, self-pity… Their fetishes are not necessarily better than ours (though it must be said we share most of them).

(Update 9/2/05: All of that isn't strictly relevant to the whole organic-metaphor thing, but it sort of came to mind.)

Also, as I try to show in my picture at the head of this post, there is too high a likelihood of damage to the tree from trying to remove a diseased, dead or malfunctioning set of cells. The cells in question are not discrete enough to be simple. It might be better to just lop off a diseased bough. (Of course, this assumes that the monarchy is part of the trunk and not a diseased bough itself: I think the monarchy’s age is the decisive piece of evidence there. Anything a over thousand years old is pretty well embedded and shouldn’t be removed unless the problems it causes are severe, urgent and obvious to all.)

In modern society the key feature is immense, ramifying, interlocking complexity. That was true even in the eighteenth century and is truer still now. Given that, any attempt to get rid of a major institution (when there is no imminent peril) is at best a distraction from weightier matters and at worst self-destructive.   

356 years later

Arthur Herman's article in National Review is very Whig. It's also true.

Who deserves it?

First, to set the parameters for this post: Prince Harry is a prat with some very nasty aristofascist friends. Nuff said.

Second, if one is going to use fighting words then make sure you use them accurately. The folks at Socialism In an Age of Waiting have endorsed some rather intemperate words from the Virtual Stoa which I think deserve no such endorsement. Let's have a shy.

"aristocrats and their apologists (both secular and ecclesiastical) opposed the ideology of human rights every step of the way from the eighteenth through to the twentieth centuries..."

A minute's thought and ten minutes Googling brought me a few links by way of commentary on that statement. In the eighteenth century, Lords Rockingham and Shelburne, brought recognised American independence, which might be said to have been a step in the right direction as far as human rights were concerned. OK, they don't deserve much credit for that, but they deserve some.

More substantial evidence required? In the nineteenth century it was partly through the efforts and with the leadership of Lord Shaftesbury, of the long-established Ashley Cooper family, that the Ten Hours Act was passed limiting children's work hours in the teeth of furious opposition by business interests. He followed through by spending most of his life trying to get children out of factories and mines and into schools. Not everyone agrees that education is a right (though the UN thinks so, for what it's worth - see article 26), but I doubt if even the most hardcore free market fundamentalist nowadays advocates making ten-year-olds work twelve-hour days in factories. Just saying, y'know.

And in the twentieth century? Check out this obituary for Lord Wilberforce. No, not that Lord Wilberforce. This one, the former head of Anti-Slavery International.

A bit more time and I could multiply examples. OK, these are individual cases, not a statistical survey of the aristocracy: but then Virtual Stoa left that goal wide open for me - they did after all say 'aristocrats and their apologists...'. Even if one did say 'the aristocracy' (i.e. the class rather than its constituent individuals) the case isn't so clear as all that, since the House of Lords, though often acting with mule-headed obstinacy to oppose necessary reforms (the Great Reform Act of 1832 and the crisis of 1910-12 being the strongest examples) has never been a monolith.

All of these men, you might say, acted out of paternalism, not out of a real belief in human rights. Perhaps (and if so, good for paternalism), though Wilberforce and Shaftesbury would certainly have said that they had a belief in equality - equality before God, perhaps a different sort of belief in equality to that of a modern liberal humanist, but perhaps not to be despised for that reason.

As for the apologists of aristocracy, the first and greatest of these was Edmund Burke. Of him one can say that he did indeed oppose the ideology of human rights, but he did a good deal for actual human rights, for instance with his long unrewarded efforts to punish Warren Hastings for abuses in India.

"there's also a political campaign to wage, and what that needs right now is the spread of an attitude of naked contempt for monarchy and its political, economic and social supports".

Speaking as one of those supports, I don't see what I've done to deserve it. Or do they mean 'supports' in some nice safe antiseptic way, akin to hating the support but loving the supporter? The difficulty is that contempt - their word - tends to spill over from a cause to the people who participate in it. It is difficult to say to anyone 'I have contempt for your cause' and then buy them a pint. It is possible, by contrast, to socialise with people you merely oppose. (As a side issue, this shows how hard it is to distinguish a cause from the people who support it, a fact relevant to the debate over the religious-hatred Bill.) Contempt is a strong drug, one of the strongest, like lust and greed, and it should be used only in extreme, urgent cases. The monarchy and aristocracy are not that: the question of what to do about them would come about 754th on my list of issues the country needs to tackle, some significant way behind persuading people on buses to turn the volume down on their personal stereos. There are, in fact, good reasons to oppose the existence of the monarchy and aristocracy, though I think they are outweighed by the benefits, as I explained in my debut post. But my advice is: reserve one's contempt (and SIAW do contempt marvellously well) for people who deserve it: that is, tyrants, terrorists, murderers, rapists, in short anyone who uses violence against the innocent, and their apologists.

I hope SIAW have read Burke, as good Marxists should (just like good reactionaries should make sure to read The Communist Manifesto at the very least). If so they might find a pertinent comment on the issue of why going after the ancien regime is a distraction even from the perspective of a radical:

"...the ordinary actors and instruments in great public evils are kings, priests, magistrates, senates, parliaments, national assemblies, judges, and captains. You would not cure the evil by resolving, that there should be no more monarchs, nor ministers of state, nor of the gospel; no interpreters of law; no general officers; no public councils. You might change the names. The things in some shape must remain... Wise men will apply their remedies to vices, not to names; to the causes of evil which are permanent, not to the occasional organs by which they act, and the transitory modes in which they appear. Otherwise you will be wise historically, a fool in practice. Seldom have two ages the same fashion in their pretexts and the same modes of mischief. Wickedness is a little more inventive... The very same vice assumes a new body. The spirit transmigrates; and, far from losing its principle of life by the change of its appearance, it is renovated in its new organs with a fresh vigour of a juvenile activity. It walks abroad, it continues its ravages, whilst you are gibbeting the carcase, or demolishing the tomb. You are terrifying yourselves with ghosts and apparitions, whilst your house is the haunt of robbers. It is thus with all those, who, attending only to the shell and husk of history, think they are waging war with intolerance, pride, and cruelty, whilst, under colour of abhorring the ill principles of antiquated parties, they are authorizing and feeding the same odious vices in different factions, and perhaps in worse."

Hammurabi and Orwell

Chrenkoff has some excellent posts up. Klio has been inspiring him lately. One is a guest post about the law codes of ancient Mesopotamia. This fits in nicely with one of my own convictions, that the Middle East is, by tradition, really part of what one might call the Greater West. It’s been pointed out before that the peoples of the Middle East have more in common with Europeans than with, say, the Chinese, whose civilisation has utterly different roots. In religious terms, the three great monotheisms are all children of Abraham, and culturally both Europe and the Middle East were both subject to the massive influence of Greek thought and tradition. In Europe this came through the medium of Rome, in the Middle East through the effects of Alexander’s empire.

In other words, whereas the Greater West can trace its traditions to Abraham, Hammurabi and Socrates, what we might call Greater China – that is, China itself and the countries which have historically under heavy Chinese cultural influence, notably Korea, Japan and Vietnam – have roots that go in a quite different direction, reaching back to Lao-Tze, Confucius and Gautama.

The great value of Daniel Foty’s piece is his demonstration that in legal terms too the Middle East has a tradition that is at least the equal of Europe – and given the age and richness of Europe’s two great legal traditions (Germanic and Roman), that is saying something. Those early codes have two great features that are at the core of any body of civilised law: a sophisticated system of contract and a recognition that it is not merely malice that must be prevented in a civilised community, but also neglect of the basic mutual obligations that enable a sophisticated society to prosper.

As a side issue, one thing that struck me in his comparison of Hammurabi’s code with the earlier code of Lipit-Ishtar is that women play a more prominent role in the earlier code, suggesting a decline in women’s property rights between the flourishing of Sumer and the rise of Babylon. ('Aniela' makes the same observation in the comments box.) Some radical feminists have made great play with the Marduk myth (the slaying of the female monster Tiamat) as an indicator of the birth of patriarchal religion and consequently patriarchy itself. Here is a piece of historical evidence that would seem to back up that view. Just because radical feminists believe something doesn’t mean it’s untrue.

Also on Chrenkoff at the moment, a good post on the value of historical perspective, ‘Time Will Tell’. He quotes Martin Gilbert on the way our views of Roosevelt and Churchill are very different from those of contemporaries, many of whom hated or despised them. And I’m not talking about Germans or Japanese here. He could have added Abraham Lincoln, who was routinely portrayed in newspapers as a buffoon or worse. And I’m not talking about the South here.

One of the many good reasons to read Orwell’s wartime essays is to see just how wrong he and others could be. Orwell was an exceptionally acute and fair-minded critic in many ways but his real-time political judgements were sometimes lamentable. He thought Stafford Cripps had a chance of ousting Churchill as PM in 1942. Stafford who? Exactly. More seriously, he went to Germany just after the war ended and on returning wrote of ‘the monstrous settlement being forced on Germany’ (that’s from memory so I won’t swear to the exact quote, but the word monstrous was in there somewhere). And we all know how monstrously Germany turned out, with all those plagues, famines and civil wars that have so ruined the place since 1945.

Orwell’s military judgements were not great either. He fantasised about invading Spain at one point – a forgivable lapse given his personal history. He also said, after the German invasion of Russia, ‘if we can’t invade Europe now, with the German army tied down in the east, when will we be able to?’ The answer was, of course, never, not without 2 million Americans alongside us to do their bit. He also had an odd sense of proportion, spending a lot of time and ink on domestic policy and politics while never mentioning pivotal events like Lend-Lease, the Malta convoys or the battle of Midway. (That’s from memory too: I might be defaming him, but I don’t recall him mentioning those events in his essays.) None of that, of course, takes away the fact that he was a wonderfully talented writer, perhaps a genius.

So just to make Chrenkoff’s point again: nobody knows, especially not journalists, who obsess about trivia and miss the key facts at least half the time.

‘The passage of time will not be a panacea for the current condition of historical short-sightedness and ignorance. After all, there is hardly a historic event that is still not subject to controversy and debate. But like a steady river, it will eventually remove all the daily garbage choking up the view. It's only five, ten or fifty years on that we will know whether the intervention in Iraq has been a success - certainly not now. The same can be said for the question of greatness or otherwise of our current leaders. In the meantime though, not having the benefit of hindsight on the present day events, I could only pray that more of our contemporaries living in their eternal present, with little awareness of context or precedent, could take a little sip or two from the fountain of history and realize that they're only splashing around on the edge of an ocean.’

If it's too good to be true

This story is one that would bear repeating. As I've said before here, when people call the Yanks stupid people might smile for different reasons - either because they believe it, or because they don't but want our enemies to think so. In this case it was quite clearly the Europeans who were the ignorant ones.

(Via Instapundit.)

I wonder who today remembers the Baruch Plan. The essence of it was an American proposal in 1946 to place all nuclear technology and weaponry under the control of the UN. It was entirely American in its idealism, its identification of the decisive point, its attempt to make the ideal a working reality. It failed, of course, but there's no real reason to doubt its sincerity. Next time some Chomskian zombie tries to tell you the USA was responsible for the Cold War, bring the facts of the Baruch Plan before their consciousness. Chances are they will never have heard of it. Then smile. 

And the Fairy Godmother said

Iran and China are the most serious medium-to-long-term threats the Allies have to deal with. Both bear a family resemblance to pre-1914 Germany: repressive, authoritarian militaristic states with expansionist ambitions, contained by the dominant world powers. Both - like Imperial Germany - have had chances to reform themselves down more productive paths.

And like Imperial Germany they have not done so. I forget now who it was who said that in 1848 Germany reached a turning point and failed to turn: the revolution of that year could have given a decisive liberalising impetus, but the combination of unrealistic socialist revolutionaries, impractical liberal idealists and (above all) unimaginative and thuggish autocrats was fatal to Germany's chance of achieving the happy balance of a British-style constitution. Germany had at least two later chances - at the time of the struggle between Parliament and Bismarck in the 1860s, then again on Bismarck's dismissal in 1890 - but the old regime was too set in its ways to get off the long slide. The ultimate victim was European civilisation, which was mortally wounded in 1914 and finished off in 1945. (The Americans resurrected a version of it, partly for their own purposes, but it was a mere shadow of the original).

The Fairy Godmother of History gave the Chinese regime three chances. (Three, of course.) Tiananmen was the first: the Falun Gong cult the second: Hong Kong the third. (I take it as a given that China will continue trying to stifle HK's freedoms: if I'm wrong on that feel free to correct me.) In each case the regime was asked a question, but showed no sign of recognising that it had any option other than repression. The regime is not reformable any longer, if it ever was: it has been shown to be interested only in the first stage of reform - the kinds of reform that increase the efficiency of the system without giving up anything essential.

Iran has had its chances too. The death of Khomeini, the elections of 2000 and the regime change in Iraq all gave the regime a possibility for internal reform and - hand-in-hand with that - international co-operation and even amity. The Fairy Godmother was not given house room, however, and she's unlikely to return.

The great virtue of the West is that we usually get her message, if not at the first time of asking: authoritarian, nationalistic thug-states don't, and so procure their own ruin. Which wouldn't be a problem if they didn't take so much else - of beauty and value - with them into the night.

Aware

Well-informed readers of this weblog (a tautology, surely) will know what I mean if I say that recently several organisations that I would once have thought above criticism have suffered in my esteem. Amnesty and the Red Cross seem to have adopted a world-view in which the West and its enemies are morally equivalent. The UN no longer seems to me like an essential source of legitimacy, its moral authority eroded by corruption and a highly selective approach to human rights.

Index on Censorship is the most recent and egregious example. Doubtless they were just trying to stimulate a lively debate - an all-purpose excuse nowadays used by people who have said something offensive and stupid, an excuse which has the charming advantage of allowing one to reclaim the moral high ground by implying that one's critics are trying to stifle debate.

Stuff happens. In this case, what's happened is a classic case of what the Japanese call aware: the evanescence of things. Christian theology has a similar idea: the inherent corruptibility of all things. (Even the Church, though divinely founded, was corrupted within a few centuries.) The better a thing is founded, the longer it will go before it is corrupted, though the corruption is inherent and inevitable. The UN was ill-founded, marred from the first by the need to draw Stalin's USSR into it. Amnesty and suchlike bodies, founded on good liberal principles, are corrupted more slowly, and in a somewhat different way.

Prisoners' Dilemma has always fascinated me. It seems to have so many applications in unexpected places - unexpected, that is, at first sight, though less so when one reflects that PD is ultimately about trust, and the question of trust is fundamental to the res publica. The optimal strategy is called Tit For Tat: one normally 'cooperates' with one's fellow-prisoner, but if he 'defects', then one should retaliate by doing likewise in the next iteration. 

Imagine a group of good liberal humanists setting up an organisation to campaign for human rights. They are all liberals of the Tit for Tat variety: though they are keen to co-operate with their more radical comrades ("no enemies on the left") they accept the need for rules to ensure that the aims of the organisation are maintained. Since this is clear at the outset, no-one ever betrays the values of the organisation.

Except that this very success creates a weakness. Because no-one ever Defects, the individuals who make up the organisation start to assume that their strategy is Always Cooperate rather than TfT. Both seem to have the same results. To begin with, this doesn't matter. But then one or more radicals of the SWP type get in. They aren't interested in human rights: they're interested in getting their own way. The Always Cooperate liberals don't know how to respond. Within a short space of time, they've been muscled out, allowed to retain one or two symbolic positions to ensure that all concerned can pretend that it's just a broad-based alliance of like-minded people.

This idea - of TfT Erosion - isn't an original theme, though I don't know who first identified the phenomenon. Something like this, I suspect, is why it is good humanistic liberals always end up getting shafted. Adopting a consistent conscious policy of Tit for Tat makes you look too much - horror, horror - like a conservative.

Furthermore it occurs to me that the split between TfT and Always Cooperate looks rather like the split between the EU and US in foreign policy. The latest dealings involving the EU, US and Iran seem to illustrate the point: the EU makes a deal with Iran in 2003. Iran rats on the deal. The EU makes the same deal again. The EU, and most of the European public, appears to have forgotten that diplomacy is only meaningful when one has a trustworthy interlocutor.

Everything we do is cherry blossom, unless we reflect on what we're doing and learn. And we are as likely to forget as learn.