VOLTAIRE'S BASTARDS -- THE DICTATORSHIP OF REASON IN THE WES

"Science," the Greek word for knowledge, when appended to the word "political," creates what seems like an oxymoron. For who could claim to know politics? More complicated than any game, most people who play it become addicts and die without understanding what they were addicted to. The rest of us suffer under their malpractice as our "leaders." A truer case of the blind leading the blind could not be found. Plumb the depths of confusion here.

Re: VOLTAIRE'S BASTARDS -- THE DICTATORSHIP OF REASON IN THE

Postby admin » Thu Jul 02, 2015 9:37 pm

13. The Secretive Knight

In defence of the technocrats' addiction to secrecy, it must be said that they have long found comfort in their view of science as the miraculous knight of reason. Science led the way in the battle against the forces of darkness. Discoveries were celebrated as if new territories had been won on the road to a place of eternal light where knowledge would reign. And yet these very real advances in the uncovering of nature's secrets seemed increasingly to create a world which escaped the control of society. New knowledge and new positive powers in the hands of man seemed inevitably to be matched with new inaccessible elites and a new sophistication in the arts of violence and destruction.

Science, the miraculous knight, has consistently resembled a splicing together of Merlin and Lancelot. The former was part prophet, part magician, born of a devil and a virtuous maiden, at one with the laws of nature and therefore able to exploit them. He secretly prepared Arthur to become the perfect king in his hour of destiny. In part because of his immortality, Merlin can be alternately a symbol of freedom or of enslavement. Lancelot, on the other hand, was the greatest of Arthur's knights, the model of chivalry, bravery and fidelity. But he also carried with him the secret of his adulterous love for the Queen, a betrayal which negated all of his qualities. He twice caught sight of the Grail. But his impurity caused him to fail at the last moment and eventually it was that impure secret which brought on the war that destroyed the Round Table and caused Arthur's death. And so the servant of the greater good inexplicably destroyed it, just as the miraculous Merlin, uncoverer of perfection, inexplicably was unable to understand the forces he was releasing.

The great Scientific Revolution in which we are still engulfed began in 1543 when Copernicus published On the Revolution of the Celestial Spheres, laying out a theory in which the earth revolved around the sun. From then on all progress seemed to be a victory against established authority and official ideas. Interestingly enough, the opposition to Copernicus was firmer among the leaders of the Reformation, beginning with Martin Luther, than it was in Rome, where Pope Clement VII gave approval for an earlier version of the Revolution to be published. However, when Galileo published his Dialogue on the Chief Systems in 1632, clarifying and actually proving Copernicus's argument, he was put on trial by the Inquisition and forced to recant.

It seemed clear from then on that scientists had embraced the ultimate virtue. They did not appeal in their arguments, as the twentieth-century mathematician and humanist Jacob Bronowski has put it, to race, politics, sex or age. They resisted "every form of persuasion but the fact. [1] Truth was their guide in a world where everyone else was led by interest. Francis Bacon's social model of a dictatorship led by scientists, as laid out in New Atlantis, must be seen in that context. His idea of a nocturnal council of senior scientists, who would decide in secrecy what to do with the new knowledge and how much to tell the population at large, was the beginning of a debate which is still with us. As suited the mind of a courtier, Bacon opted for secrecy and manipulation in the best interests of the public.

But the more general view among scientists has always been that secrecy has no place in their work. To the contrary, theirs is a permanent and open debate around the world -- a "Republic of Science," as Michael Polanyi put it." In the free cooperation of independent scientists we shall find a highly simplified model of a free society." [2] Or as the nuclear physicist Robert Oppenheimer wrote, "One thing we find throughout the house: there are no locks; there are no shut doors; wherever we go there are the signs and usually the words of welcome. It is an open house, open to all comers." [3]

Of course, the situation is not quite so simple. The Republic of Science does exist in the exalted sphere of pure research. Not only secrecy has no role; neither does social interest. Virtue at this level is the investigation and revelation of the laws of nature. The line between this disinterested work and applied science is theoretically clear. In practice it is confused. Many scientists find themselves on both sides. Once across on the side of application, a whole other set of rules applies. Application involves the interests of race, politics, sex and age, just for a start. Nonscientific choices must be made. Secrecy becomes a tool of the knowledge holder.

It is the confusion over how to deal with crossing the line from theoretical to practical science which so troubles the scientists. If, once across, they surrender all power over knowledge, they quickly find themselves forced by public and private authorities to do things which disturb them for nonscientific reasons. The virtue found in theoretical work is the disinterested purity of the laws of nature. However, human civilization is always "interested" and all choices surrounding scientific application eventually touch moral questions. A very different sort of virtue is involved and the scientist is faced with the impossible task of satisfying both.

This contradiction has been gradually obscured by a third and arbitrary value: the virtue attached to all progress. In order to establish this, the inevitability attributed to theoretical science is arbitrarily extended to applied science, thus eliminating the possibility of making practical choices through public mechanisms. Common sense can tell us at any time that no application is inevitable. Or that civilization must decide what it wishes to do with a breakthrough of science. However, in the rush and disorder of the Scientific Revolution, very few choices have been made by society. Theoretical research may well be open and disinterested, but it also deals in areas obscure to the citizenry. That obscurity has somehow set the tone for all levels of scientific work, thus making any sensible intervention by the citizenry virtually impossible.

In spite of this there was a widespread feeling until the arrival of nuclear power that the force of science, in the words of Andre Malraux, "could not turn upon man." [4] The Western world abounded in paintings and statuary which celebrated the good wrought by science. One of the most absolute of these evocations is the 1899 statue of Nature Uncovering Herself Before Science, by the French artist Louis-Ernest Barrias. There she is in the great hall of fetes in the Orsay Museum in Paris, a voluptuous, life-size woman sculpted out of marble, onyx, lapis lazuli and malachite. Her wonderful shoulders and breasts are bare. A scarab beetle at her waist holds together with its claws the drapery which hides the rest of her. The scarab is knowledge. No doubt the sculptor meant us to feel that, with a little coaxing, the beetle would release the cloth, revealing, as it slipped away, the most secret and intimate parts; that knowledge could and would reveal all secrets, if we befriended it. With the help of knowledge, men would penetrate the secrets of nature and the world.

And yet the beetle was in a position to play it either way. By simply using its little claws to keep the veils in place, knowledge would gain great power. Science, with the aid of the beetle, could explore every orifice of nature, giving itself orgasmic pleasure along the way, but deal out to the public only that information which suited it. Few men like to share a mistress, but they do like everyone to know that she is beautiful and gives pleasure.

Although the idealized nineteenth-century love affair between man and the secrets of science was passionate, very early on there were doubts about the innate goodness of such progress. Frankenstein's monster was the most popular example. Mary Shelley's story of the struggle between science and humanism was written in 1818. Frankenstein, the optimistic scientist, creates his ugly monster and educates him with Goethe, Plutarch, Milton. The monster, however, cannot live without love and so becomes a reluctant murderer. The drama ends in Antarctica, where Frankenstein dies and his monster wanders off alone into the snow in order to do the same. By midcentury the philosopher of art, John Ruskin, was writing of modern science such things as: "It gives lectures on Botany, of which the object is to show that there is no flower." Or again, "there was some excuse for your being a little proud when, about last sixth of April you knotted a copper wire all the way to Bombay, and flashed a message along it, and back -- But what was the message, and what the answer? Is India the better for what you said to her?" [5]

Of course, it could be argued that Ruskin was responsible for much of the romantic overstatement which allowed many writers and creators to surrender in their ongoing battle for a public voice and retreat into private places and subjects. His basic contention, that progress was not of itself good, became the contention of many of the creative, unscientific minds. They assumed, following Ruskin, that if not of itself good, then progress must be of itself bad. And so they fled away to the safer ground of private questions, on which so much of the twentieth century's creativity has taken place.

But Ruskin was himself one of the great revolutionary theorists of art and architecture. He helped civilization to see in a new way and in so doing helped to release a fresh burst of creativity which spread from Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Morris and the Pre- Raphaelites to George Eliot, Walt Whitman and Marcel Proust: The instinctive leaps in his theory resembled those of theoretical scientific research. A century later, Bronowski was examining the same question. Is there any difference between "the creative acts of the mind in art and in science"? He argued that the discoveries of science and works of art are both explorations -- in fact, "are explosions, of a hidden likeness." [6] It was not this sort of creativity which bothered Ruskin, who was also an accomplished geologist, but the seeming impossibility of having any control over the direction and speed of subsequent applications. In truth, if there had been a divorce of science from art, it was an unwilling separation, forced by the absolute doctrine of structure and progress. Ruskin was astonishingly modern. His theories of beauty led him increasingly to political radicalism. His attacks on the mindlessness of applied science were tied into his attacks on social and economic structures which "actually promoted human suffering and the destruction of beauty, whether natural or man-made." [7]

As for the general public, by the middle of the twentieth century, its unquestioning confidence in the innate good of science had worn thin. What remained was a profound, inexpressible need to go on believing that science must be allowed to unfold, that nothing was. more reprehensible than even a hint of resistance in the face of scientific progress. Logic can multiply the smallest doubt at terrifying speed and to question is to doubt. To doubt is to fear. To fear is irrational. To be irrational is to embrace ignorance and emotional instability. And before you know it, you are a Luddite.

As a result, whatever fears are felt, our attitude towards science is that whether pure or applied, it is a single force which must be allowed to move forward. The word forward no longer makes any sense to us, but then many of our difficulties lie in these language traps. A civilization which moves massively in any direction without conscious self-control is in disordered flight as if pursued by enemy hordes. For example, over the last two decades we have become used to frightened groups who belong to what is called the Right, urging upon civilization a general flight into the past. At the same time the inaccessible, almost mystical religion of progress through science has enforced a flight forward into unknown futures.

As for the scientists, the vast majority of whom continue to believe in the inviolability of progress, they still do so with the driven purity of terrorists. Indeed, their devotion to the need for physical change reassures us that our society is not in confusion or bogged down. The few scientists who learn to doubt and dare to do so publicly, are usually discredited as being unstable by the majority of the scientific community.

From time to time, a scientific leader will find the right words with which to question our society's assumptions. The Nobel Prize-winning chemist, John Polanyi, calmly persists in a campaign for common sense to be applied to the development of knowledge." The progress of science," he argues, "has its own logic, which you ignore at your peril." [8] He is not suggesting that attempts should be made to restrain pure science, but that society, with the aid of scientists, must develop mechanisms of choice which apply common sense, public interest and morality to the development of scientific breakthroughs.

***

The prime example of the seemingly uncontrollable relationship between research and development was the investigation which entered its final stage with Einstein's theory of relativity in 1905 and culminated with Otto Hahn's splitting of the atom in 1939. The first application was the atomic bomb. The scientists who produced that explosion felt themselves obliged to discuss, in secret, as the times required, the implications of their work. These discussions produced a report which was delivered by hand in June 1945, a month before the first atomic bomb test, to Henry Stimson, the American Secretary of War:

In the past, science has often been able to provide new methods of protection against new weapons of aggression.... But it cannot promise such efficient protection against the destructive use of nuclear power. The protection can come only from the political organization of the world. Among all the arguments calling for an efficient international organization for peace, the existence of nuclear weapons is the most compelling one.

[We] cannot hope to avoid a nuclear armament race either by keeping secret from the competing nations the basic scientific facts of nuclear power, or by cornering the raw materials required for such a race.

[T]he race for nuclear armaments will be on in earnest not later than the morning after our first demonstration of the existence of nuclear weapons.


The Franck Report was received and put away, to be ignored by the political and the administrative structure. The nuclear physicists who signed this document were in the unusual position of inventing a process whose full consequences were immediately foreseeable. Their call for common sense before the bomb was dropped can be seen as a cry of desperation. Because, from the moment of the explosion, a new profession could not help but be formalized -- that of the scientists trained and employed to further develop the greatest weapon ever invented. That profession would have a structure linking it to the structures of the state. And the whole thing would be buoyed up by a self-justifying logic. Only in those last days before the explosion were the inventors both conscious and free; a combination which, as the Book of Genesis established some time ago, brings on expulsion from the garden of innocence and an admission of the evil within each individual.

In the Franck Report, the scientists were attempting to take responsibility for the unacceptable application of their inevitable· invention. That is the optimistic interpretation. A more cynical view would be that they were declaring pure science to be an innocent participant in the whole affair and shifting responsibility for any application to the politicians. But it was the finest scientists of the century who in the first place had encouraged the politicians to build the bomb or had themselves agreed to build it. Einstein, Leo Szilard, Niels Bohr, James Franck, J. Robert Oppenheimer and dozens of others were involved. All considered themselves to be humanists, and many were pacifists. Their call in 1945 for nuclear restraint by the politicians was sincere, but was it honest?

Einstein, who wrote to President Roosevelt in 1939 encouraging him to build the bomb as fast as possible in order to stay ahead of the Germans, said after it was dropped, "If I knew they were going to do this, I would have become a shoemaker." If Einstein did not understand the process of development and did not help the public to understand it, what responsibility was he taking in his letter of 1939? To put it crudely, just because Einstein thought himself a nice guy doesn't mean he was.

The real problem is that during four hundred years of scientific revolution, the continual message has been that invention and change are virtues, rational virtues, As for the dividing line between the inevitability of pure science and the choices theoretically presented by applied science, no attempt has ever been made to formalize the crossover point in coordination with the development of a public process of choice, Only the scientists have had any hope of identifying that line before, during or after it is crossed, as the Manhattan Project demonstrated, It would be unrealistic to imagine that the line could ever be perfectly clear. However, the "Republic of Science" could improve this situation if it recognized a second obligation, equal to that, of open debate among experts -- that is, an obligation to help the citizen understand the choices at stake. This would involve refusing the comforts of exclusive language and exclusive dialogues with the power structures. In other words, for the first time in modern history, to develop the idea that society, with the help of the scientist, has a brief to alter the progress of progress.

And yet, as John Polanyi points out, most scientists continue to remain silent because they regard themselves as too poorly informed to make a contribution outside their narrow fields. In a world of expertise and competing structures, they, the mythological experts, are indeed ignorant about the political and economic structures which administer society. When the occasional scientist does actually speak out, he is more often than not mercilessly martyrized.

The example of Oppenheimer is wired into the collective memory of the international scientific community like an illuminated cross that flashes on whenever they are tempted to convert their scientific expertise into public morality. Oppenheimer was the physicist chosen to direct the Manhattan Project. Neither before nor after Hiroshima did he doubt that it was "man's highest function to know and to understand the objective world and its laws." [9] However, he found the division between knowing and applying increasingly difficult to deal With. From the Franck Report on, he grew reluctant about further development of the bomb. He gradually applied what could be described as scientifically informed moral or humanist standards in order to put a brake on the nuclear military program, for whose future he was still partially responsible. As a result he was caught up in the. net of McCarthyism and treated as part of the Communist scare. This led to his removal from positions of responsibility. Only then did he seriously carry his campaign for the moral application of scientific knowledge outside the circles. of scientific and political power into the arena of public debate.

***

Our civilization detests the expert who gives in to generalized free speech. Public comment by an individual speaking outside his area of expertise, or even attempting to draw wider conclusions from his specific knowledge, is seen as a dangerous victory of emotion over professional competence. It interferes in the domains of others and it suggests that structures are inadequate. The words of a writer or of a journalist are relatively harmless. They come from the margins. But a proper expert, who is therefore a full participant in society, is attacking himself when he attacks others. As for critical public comment by an individual on his own area of expertise, that is almost worse. He is betraying the secrets of his confrerie. Expertise and structure thus succeed in silencing most serious public debate.

In the world of science the modern secret finds its full worth. Knowing and understanding are the qualities of rational man which permit him to act. But the scientist retains that knowledge. He holds it back. Not in its details. Those are handed over to companies and, governments. But he holds back any configuration of those details which would allow the citizen to understand. When faced by questioning from nonexperts, the scientist invariably retreats behind veils of complication and specialization. Of course it is complicated. But there is no other profession in which the sense of obligation to convert the inner dialect into the language of man is so absolutely absent. Through this form of secrecy the scientist makes it impossible for the citizen to know and to understand and therefore to act, except in ignorance. At its best, thanks to solid common sense, human ignorance may still attain the level of decent humanism; at worst it is emotive and fearful. In any case, both humanism and emotion will be discounted by expertise.

The nuclear industry has become a microcosm of all the protective superiority and secrecy attached to scientific knowledge. In France, for example, the decision was taken by the administrative elites, in the late 1950s, to reduce oil imports by converting to nuclear energy. Some 70 percent of the country's needs are now satisfied by nuclear reactors. Soon the figure will be 80 percent, as twenty more plants are added to the existing forty and fast-breeder reactors come fully on stream. Between the introduction of the original plants and 1986, there was not a single nuclear accident in France. Its elites were thus able to boast at home and around the world of their system's superiority. Like the systems of other countries, it was being sold on the international market. The other builders of nuclear plants -- the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Japan, the Soviet Union -- had not had many accidents and most of those were described as mere technical incidents. In general this appeared to be a safe industry bringing much needed energy to those who lacked oil and coal. For decades it was unsullied in the public mind. This was the future of technology: clean, Silent, invisible as opposed to the dirty, noisy, obtrusive methods of the nineteenth century. The sense of purity was such that the scientific myth of moral change for the good of mankind was given a whole new boost. The public good was here synonymous with applied knowledge. Young scientists around the world dreamed of joining the nuclear sector and doing good, not unlike the young men who once dreamed of following Saint Francis. They were not seeking great fortunes on the backs of others. They weren't becoming property developers or currency speculators or leveraged buyout manipulators. They were choosing public service, which if not so sacrificial as joining the early Franciscans was nevertheless neither selfish nor self-interested.

And what was true everywhere else was particularly true in France, where the industry's record was perfect. A national consensus, ever more solid, reflected the confidence of experience and, inevitably, the confidence born of necessity as the country became increasingly reliant on the nuclear grid. Nuclear scientists had once worked for a future dream. Now they defended a national system.

Then, in 1986, came the accident at Chernobyl. The leak had been so bad that it was first detected outside the Soviet Union when the alarm systems inside Swedish reactors went off as if there were a local disaster. All of Europe went on radiation alert. In the weeks that followed, it became clear that there had been massive contamination of food products across the continent. Milk and cheese were destroyed in most places. Italy destroyed its vegetables and kept children indoors. Contaminated animals were killed and burnt.

Curiously, France alone seemed to have been spared by the winds bearing clouds of radiation. Life went on. Milk, cheese, vegetables and animals were eaten. As citizens looked at the daily maps of radiation movements in their newspapers, they could not help but be confused by the Cartesian elegance with which the winds carried contamination to the north and to the south, leaving a neat hole in the middle large enough to accommodate France.

As it turned out, there had been no stupidity or political manipulation. The French nuclear scientists were simply so used to protecting their citizens from the moral dangers of knowledge improperly understood that they had extended the same protection to the Russians.

This protective impulse might be called the conspiracy against panic. Rational man's greatest fear remains that the citizen will fall back on his baser instincts and act rashly. Reason over passion. Reason over fear. Reason over panic. Above all, modern man must remain calm.

Interestingly enough, in those countries which dealt most openly with the dangers of the Chernobyl accident, the citizens took their right to panic to heart. They listened carefully to all warnings and advice. They did not eat what they were told was dangerous. They did not complain about lost crops. They kept their children indoors. No one ran amok in the streets. They used their common sense to panic with dignity.

And when, in France, the knowledge began to filter through that they had been treated like children, the citizens reacted with a certain anger. First, French lamb was rejected at foreign borders as toxic. France's experts blamed this on foreign ignorance. Then even French herbs were turned-back from Japan. The international press began to concentrate on the refusal of Paris to admit that something serious had happened. Gradually the French citizen's confidence in the nuclear system was shaken. In the weeks that followed, the revelation of undeniable deceit forced a certain openness upon the experts.

Suddenly, nuclear reactors, safe for thirty years, began to have accidents -- a half dozen in the next twelve months. Then accounts of earlier accidents began to leak out. On April 4, 1984, at Bugey, which lies in the intensely cultivated and heavily populated area between the Swiss border and Lyon, the official unpublished report had said -- "An incident of this gravity has not been met with before on a heavy water reactor.... A supplementary failure ... would therefore have led to a complete loss of electrical power, an unmeasurable situation.... The failure of the valves to close would have led to an additional degeneration of the incident towards a situation difficult to control." [10]

The scientist responsible for this report no doubt feels that the subsequent leaking and publication of his words was a betrayal. He would probably say that if read by untrained, uninvolved outsiders, the report could be used to create a narrow and sensationalist picture of the truth. As for the truth, that is a vast intricate thing which an outsider could not possibly understand.

The average person, if called upon to listen to this explanation, would sense beneath the scientist's words an anger beyond any rational explanation. The source of this fury is the scientist's, and above all the nuclear scientist's, belief that he is Merlin/Lancelot, the miraculous servant of the future. Suddenly, ordinary people everywhere are accusing him of endangering their lives.

The beloved child reacts to the questioning of his actions as though his motives -- that is, his moral judgment -- were being questioned. He responds with the weapons he most despises. He reacts with fear; with hatred of the outsider. He lashes out. He conceals. In fact, he does the very thing he keeps saying the ignorant public will do if they are not carefully handled: he panics. And having been nursed upon the abstract, he panics badly, without common sense or dignity. This makes it impossible for society to deal calmly with the problems which arise from his labours.

In 1987 constantly high levels of radioactive contamination were registered on a beach near the Dounreay nuclear plant in Scotland. These levels were confirmed by separate expert measurement. In fact, the responsible scientists did not deny the findings. However, the plant was scheduled for expansion. Studies and hearings were underway. The same responsible scientists refused to take the beach contamination levels into account in their studies of safety standards. One had nothing to do with the other. [11] It was as if they had been presented not with facts but with disloyal information which had inexplicably gone over to the side of darkness.

Repeated leaks at the nuclear plant of Pickering -- in the suburbs of Toronto, surrounded by five million people -- are consistently described as technical problems. In the post- Chernobyl period, a documented public report in Canada threw doubt on local nuclear safety standards. The Canadian government reacted by instructing its Crown-owned nuclear reactor development corporation to reexamine those standards. Instead the corporation explained at great length that reexamination was unnecessary because the public report was based upon unfounded fears. The refusal to entertain doubt seemed to be absolute.

The scientists within nuclear plants usually report incidents to their superiors. This is part of internal expert structures, For example, it is known that in 1986 there were 2,836 accidents in the 99 American nuclear plants. In 1987 there were 2,940 accidents in the then 105 nuclear plants. [12] The information blockage seems to come at the moment when the technical knowledge threatens to escape from the absolute control of the expert system.

Over twenty-eight years, reactor accidents at the enormous Du Pont Savannah River nuclear plant in South Carolina were reported by the plant to the regional office of the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC). This included a 1985 memorandum written by a scientist to his superiors summarizing thirty "reactor incidents of greatest significance." None of this was acted on. Nor was the information reported to the central offices of the AEC or to the Department of Energy. The information was kept secret. Those concerned pretended that nothing had happened. And yet they are not the sort of people normally thought of as belonging to the criminal element. They are quite probably good citizens. Loving parents who pay their taxes and take their children to Little League practice or piano lessons. When the information finally came out, the Energy Department put this secrecy down' to a deeply rooted institutional practice going back to the Manhattan Project in 1942, when security was all-important. [13] But this hardly explains a decision not to report incidents to the Department of Energy. The Department of Energy could hardly be called a foreign agency. Rather, this obsessive retention reflects a terrible confusion of expertise, self-worth and morality.

By treating the public as children likely to panic, the scientist can succeed in making them do just that. Witness the weeping and self-flagellation in British novelist Martin Amis's introduction to his book of short stories, Einstein's Monsters. Nuclear weapons "make me want to throw up, they make me feel sick to my stomach." In the case of a nuclear war, "I shall be obliged (and it's the last thing I'll feel like doing) to retrace that long mile home, through the firestorm, the remains- of the thousand-miles-an-hour winds, the warped atoms, the grovelling dead. Then -- God willing if I still have the strength, and, of course, if they are still alive -- I must find my wife and children and I must kill them." [14] Amis's hysteria gives comfort to the scientist and to the authorities. The expert feels exonerated in his withholding of knowledge, although Amis slipped into this frenzy only because, after forty years of refusing to discuss nuclear power in a calm, open manner, the scientists have left the amateur no other style of argument.

Curiously enough, such attacks simply reinforce the scientist's view that, while nuclear weapons are a necessary evil dictated by the needs of uncivilized man, nuclear power is a good necessary to the well-being of man. And yet the risk of a catastrophe is far more likely to come from peaceful reactors than from bombs. The weapons, after all, are dormant. Someone must decide to use them. Common sense and simple humanity protect us. The reactors, however, are constantly exploding. That is how they produce energy. All that stands between man and the unleashing of this force is the effectiveness of the machinery containing the explosions and the competence of those responsible for administering the plants. One thing we do know is that neither mechanical nor human infallibility has ever existed. Passenger jets crash. High-speed, high-technology trains crash. Dams give way. Bridges fall down. And there were 2,940 nuclear accidents in the United States alone in 1987 in only 105 plants.

The late 1980s saw a breakthrough for sensible concerns over nuclear power. Britain, for example, has virtually abandoned the building of additional nuclear plants. But the way in which this happened shows that no progress has been made in bringing the secrets of science out into the open for public scrutiny. To the contrary. No public debate preceded the, government's decision; not even debate among nuclear scientists. It was simply announced that the planned government privatization of electricity would not include the nuclear sector. Closer examination revealed that this was for two reasons. First, despite decades of promises to the contrary, nuclear power was still more expensive than old- fashioned energy sources. Second, the private sector was not interested in investing in such a risky sector. They were particularly disturbed by the risks and costs involved in dismantling old plants.

Nowhere was there a hint that the public should be concerned by those risks or costs. Instead, the Chairman of the Atomic Energy Authority repeated the standard arguments: "We have to demonstrate that nuclear power is not only safe but economic. There is no doubt that the public has been confused by press reports about the financial risk of nuclear power." [15]

In other words, neither the nuclear scientists nor the government and business elites admitted anything. Instead they stated that problems in the nuclear industry came from confusion in the public's mind -- which is to say, from ignorance. One senses that what has happened in Britain constitutes only a temporary pause. The scientific community is still convinced that it must go on. It will, therefore, continue pushing inside the various systems until, one day, the British government will abruptly announce a new, improved program, This decision will seem to come out of nowhere and yet the program will be born fully formed. One of the arguments which will make continuation seem to be inevitable will be that most other Western nations have not paused, France and Canada are plunging onwards. The United States will begin again the moment there is a new energy crisis. Only Sweden appears to have made a definitive decision to denuclearize. In the spring of 1991 -- the fifth anniversary of Chernobyl -- the industry began a concerted international effort to sell the public on its new safety standards. [16]

***

The interesting questions in this debate are the simple ones the experts avoid. Why should the public submit itself to uncertain risks? What right do the scientists have to impose their timetable on the general population? Why are the scientists so panicked by the fear of moving carefully? Why do they feel obliged to flee so erratically into the future?

There is little difference between the nuclear scientist's moralistic prevention, through the retention of knowledge, of proper public debate and that of scientists in other areas. For example, every year there are two million cases of human poisoning through contact with applied pesticides, Forty thousand of these are mortal. Pesticides have poisoned water tables throughout the world. In 1987 the main rice-producing area in Italy was obliged to truck in drinking water for the farming families. Rice, of course, is grown in flooded fields, The farmers had poisoned their own water tables. The effect on the rice produced is another question, which the farmers themselves wouldn't want to discuss, In southern Europe there is an epidemic of microscopic red spiders which attack crops, These spiders are a side effect of advanced chemical antimildew treatments. A number of European studies have identified a sharp rise in terminal diseases among early-middle-aged farmers and have linked this to intensive chemical farming. The University of Guelph has tied the sharp rise in Parkinson's disease to an element in chemical fertilizers. There is also a sharp growth in human immunity to antibiotics. For example, in 1960 only 13 percent of staphylococcus infections were resistant to penicillin. In 1988 the figure was 91 percent. In part this has been traced back to overuse of these drugs, which has also led to epidemics of such diseases as meningitis and gonorrhea. Numerous tracing tests have also followed part of the problem back to the feeding of antibiotics to cows, sheep, pigs and chickens to prevent disease and stimulate growth. Fifty-five percent of American antibiotics are used on farm animals. In a phenomenon called "jumping genes," the bacteria are now developing defence mechanisms faster than the scientists can come up with new treatments. In a related development, the feeding of hormones to animals has been forbidden in Europe. This was apolitical victory over the local hormone experts, who deny any side effects, as do their colleagues in the United States. The appearance of salmonellosis inside fresh eggs was first seriously noted in the United States. In the nine years from 1979 to 1988, the recorded incidence multiplied sixfold. Dr. Douglas Archer, director of the Microbiology Division of the Food and Drug Administration's Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition, confirmed in December 1988 that the cause was the battery-hen advanced-production method. A month later a British cabinet minister, Edwina Currie, spoke publicly of this problem and was forced to resign. [17]

These random examples are relatively straightforward. The refusal of most organizations to admit that there is a problem when one does arise, let alone do anything about it, could simply be put down to corporate interests. Nothing is neater than to blame human greed. However, most of the corporations involved are run by managers, not owners. Many of these managers are scientists or engineers. Most are technocrats of one sort or another. And beyond them are gigantic reserves of expertise in universities, hospitals and institutes. The vast majority of these honourable scientists either cooperate with the problem-denial process or simply remain silent. They seem unable to step back from progress in order to disapprove specific advances.

Thus the pesticide poisonings are blamed on incorrect use by the farmers. Water-table contamination cannot be specifically linked to agriculture. When, in January 1989, it was revealed that the pesticide levels in water processed by four U.K. water authorities were above what Common Market health standards allowed, the reaction of the authorities and the government was childlike. They said the EEC level was too low. They said this ,was bad news for consumers, who would have to pay more if the strict regulations were complied with. There wasn't a hint of concern over possible health implications. The red spider epidemic is blamed on incorrect use of the antimildew products. And the spiders are seen as a technical incident which is being dealt with through the creation of additional chemical treatments. There is an absolute denial that chemical fertilizers cause any diseases or have any effects on such things as water systems. And yet the water in apparently pristine lakes in Canada can no longer be drunk unfiltered. The government warns against eating too many fish caught in these waters. Oysters and mussels from beds in unpolluted areas off Europe and North America, suddenly poison people. The problem is rarely admitted to be local. The poison has been carried into the area by a current. Not a serious word is said about the millions of tons of agricultural runoff, which is one of the causes of the tragic change in all these waters. It is denied that antibiotics survive through the food cycle. Each example of tracing is treated as incidental. Rather than reexamine its liberal use of antibiotics, the scientific community Bees forward, discovering cures for calamities which its previous cures have caused. Not only do the North American 'creators of hormones for animals deny there are any risks, they claim that the European ban is a ploy by protectionist governments against competitive foreign products. They are terrified that the European precedent will help antihormone pressure groups in the United States. The European hormone producers side with the Americans and have created a pressure group called European Enterprises for Animal Health. The name is a perfect example of the dictatorship of vocabulary carried to the point of nonsense. They have appropriated SPCA sentiments for the name of an organization devoted to the chemical fattening of animals for slaughter.

Annual analyses of the cost of organic gram farming versus chemical grain farming in the United States show that the organic system is now marginally cheaper. The production costs are the same, but the chemical farmer must pay for his expensive chemicals. Despite these facts, the scientific community remains united with the corporate structure in denigrating what they define as a nonscientific approach. Why something that works better, has no negative side effects and costs less should be eliminated on the basis of devotion to what is seen as modernity is not at all clear. The modern devotion to efficiency evaporates the moment the proposed method does not complement the methods in place. In 1989 a remarkable breakthrough was made. The American National Academy of Sciences announced the results of a long study which established that organic farming was as productive if not more productive than chemical farming. They are now recommending that forty years of government policies promoting "modern" agriculture be reversed. This revolutionary announcement was greeted with silence from the scientific community. Nor did this news roll across borders causing great discussion in the rice region of northern Italy or the intensive market garden area of southern France or in England, which prides itself on having the most modern, industrialized agriculture in Europe.

Again, the question which the scientific community shows little interest in asking or answering is why the public should be submitted to the risks without its understanding or consent. The thirty-five chemical products which go into the production and preservation of a modern apple mayor may not present a risk to public health. But why was the use of these insecticides, artificial fertilizers, fungicides and preservatives rushed ahead with? Why was there no time to publicly consider whether this was the right road and whether the citizen wished to travel down it? The parliamentary systems demand that a government justify its actions in public. The scientific community has changed our life more in this century than any parliament, and yet it feels obliged to justify nothing.

As for the scandal in early 1989 over whether British eggs contained salmonella, the process involved might easily have been mistaken for satire. First, no reference was made by scientists, politicians or journalists to the fact that this is a problem in all Western countries in which advanced industrial methods are used to raise chickens. Second, the crisis immediately fell to the lowest level of nationalism -- British eggs are good. Overnight every hen was waving a Union Jack as Mrs. Thatcher stood up for working chickens. Third, the Minister who dared to speak the truth was left in isolation by the scientific community, in order to give the impression that she was hysterical. That she had panicked. Fourth, having gotten rid of her, the responsible officials took partial measures -- just enough to prevent panic -- which confirmed that the Minister had been right all the time.

Attitudes towards science have seemed to be changing over the last few years. The sudden rise of the Green movement to a level of political importance imposed on the politicians, the bureaucrats, the businessmen and even on the scientists a more careful agenda. However, the victories being won for environmentalism are taking place almost exclusively in the political arena. This demonstrates the muscles democracy is capable of flexing. But there is a great distance between showing biceps and changing a society. For the latter, one must win over, change or destroy the system.

At this point neither the scientific community nor the bureaucrats nor the business managers have shown any major signs of responding to the new political signals. There has been a response which implies acquiescence. Environmentally sound paragraphs are now inserted, along with other motherhood issues, into the speeches of politicians and corporate leaders. Deprived of their exclusive vocabulary, environmentally oriented political parties such as the Greens have already begun to founder on the complexities of modern politics. And the few real changes to have been made are concentrated in narrow areas where there are political points to be scored.

The British government calls for environmental responsibility while attempting to keep the quality of municipal water at as low a level as legally possible. The American government is concerned about deforestation in Brazil while its own emissions of carbon dioxide are growing faster every year -- faster than the world's growth rate. The Canadian government bangs on about the dangers of acid rain while closing its eyes to the equivalent of desertification through massive deforestation. And no existing structures have engaged in any sort of discussion with those who question the wisdom of following applied science blindly into the future. If one listens attentively, there is at best a sullen silence.

The problem is not Green or anti-Green any more than it is environmentalists versus capitalists. The problem is a whole approach to truth and knowledge retention and power which goes far beyond these movements. The Green approach deals with an important slice of the scientific problem, but only a slice. Environmental risks are a result of the problem but are not the problem itself.

If the scientific-administrative structure were somehow to be won over to the Greens, it would be just as secretive; retentive and sure of itself as ever. From the self-evident truths of nuclear energy as a beneficial social good, we would pass to the self-evident truth of generalized nondevelopment.

The psychological effect the rational approach produces in people stems in part from the confusing of such words as modern and good. These belong together as little as back to nature and good. The public knows that absolutes have no place in process, but our society offers us no tools for questioning or rejecting with common sense.

The comic level to which this descends can be seen in the mythology surrounding French wine. The romantic image of a plump old vigneron, working with his gnarled hands on the vines, is central to the pleasure of drinking wine, Along with it come other images which have to do with past glories -- Henri IV drank only Nuits St. Georges; Chambertin was the favourite wine of Napoleon. And yet there is a professional and public conviction that wine produced other than with modern methodology would be undrinkable. If you say to a Frenchman, "this is organic wine," he will roll his eyes. But organic wine is simply wine made more or less as it was for Henri IV or Napoleon, that is, as it was before two late- nineteenth-century revolutions: the arrival of phylloxera, which wiped out the vineyards; and the introduction of the scientific sugaring of pressed grape juice, known as chaptalization. The organic producer macerates the grape juice longer with its skin and pips; the resulting wine is held longer in wood casks and kept longer in the bottle. Its stability, body and taste come from itself.

Modern wine tends to be filled with sulfur, chemical stabilizers, fungicides, beet sugar and alcohol additives. These elements, not grape alcohol, are the cause of most hangovers. Contemporary wine doesn't taste anything like Henri IV's Nuit St. Georges. It is forced, matures quicker and dies faster. Like nuclear reactors, modern wine is part of the secretive promise of our society.
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Re: VOLTAIRE'S BASTARDS -- THE DICTATORSHIP OF REASON IN THE

Postby admin » Thu Jul 02, 2015 9:47 pm

PART 1 OF 2

14. Of Princes and Heroes

There is a curious conceit in the West that our leaders are the product of chance or accident. We therefore tend to complain in an oddly disinterested way about those we place in authority over us. Stranger still, when faced by public needs, problems or crises, we have a tendency to expect the almost-instantaneous appearance of leaders who are appropriate to the situation.

The reality is that leaders are rarely produced by either events or accidents. They tend rather to be the natural product of long-term structures and of a civilization's gradual evolution. The citizens' choices are often so limited by these trends that they find themselves obliged to fight wars under the leadership of social reformers, as was the case in Britain, France and the United States for most of World War I. Sixty years later the economic collapse of 1973 found the United States in the hands of a pure politician, devoid of financial common sense. France and Britain were then led by technocrats, whose tools were primarily administrative. Germany alone of the Western nations had a competent economist in place at the right moment and that for reasons unrelated to the immediate crisis.

These missed rendezvous are often used as evidence to support the modern truism that democracy is an unwieldy and ineffective way to govern. A more honest and accurate argument would be that democracy is increasingly crippled by the acceptance of rational methodology in the creation and selection of leaders. These leaders are then inappropriate to the democratic process and actually undermine it by working against its inherent needs. From our conversion to reason two types of leaders have emerged: the rational prince and the Hero.

The prince remains true to his origins. He was very much the creation of Machiavelli, and then of Loyola, Bacon, Descartes and Richelieu. Modern leaders are not eager to claim these ancestors. Nevertheless, it was Machiavelli's rational prince who multiplied and occupied the positions of administrative power so effectively that he was soon spreading out into politics. The politicians themselves then began to imitate the methods of their employees, thus obscuring the natural and profound enmity between democracy and rational management. As a result the development of the citizen's democratic reflexes was constantly sabotaged and the development of the idea of the democratic leader was alternately blocked and deformed.

The general frustration created by these obscure battles eventually produced a new type of leader -- the Hero. He was a facile combination of the democratic and the rational approaches -- simultaneously popular and efficient. He was popular thanks to the combining of the majesty proper to kings with the worship proper to God in order to twist public opinion into adulation. He was efficient because his power left him free to administer without social restraint.

Unfortunately this joint solution was a betrayal of both public opinion and public administration. All Heroes, it rapidly became clear, were the enemies of the public interest. And the key to their power was a talent for using effective violence against the citizenry when necessary. Even the Hero who used his power to do good was merely preparing the way for another who would do evil with greater ease. The perplexing question this raises is how a civilization, which emerged from the destruction of the absolute power of kings and churches, in the name of such things as liberty and equality, could have become devoted to such a cult.

Stranger still, it was clear from Napoleon on that only the rare individual could become a real Hero, capable of the superhuman feats and weaknesses which destroy the power and self-respect of the citizen. The continued growth of the Heroic option therefore meant the development of a third and more easily attainable leadership type -- the falsely Heroic leader. These people might rise to power through violence, in imitation of the real Hero, or through the established methods of democratic society. But they would deform that process by using Heroic imagery and promises of Heroic efficiency.

The overall effect has been that our society now finds itself dominated by the occasional terrifying real Hero, scattered between bevies of false Heroes, most of whom have managed to use the electoral system, and a whole range of unelected rational princes, the leading examples of whom preside over our legal codes. None of these three categories is easily controlled, because their power is the fruit of a profound rejection of the democratic relationship.

Princes

On October 13, 1761, a thirty-year-old French Calvinist, Marc-Antoine Calas, hanged himself in his' father's shop on the rue des Filatiers in Toulouse. [1] In order to protect his son's reputation, Jean Calas, who was a leading textile merchant, tried to hide the suicide. The tensions between the town's Catholic majority and Protestant minority led to the growth of a rumour that Jean Calas had strangled his son after discovering that he was about to convert to Catholicism. The merchant was subsequently arrested and a protracted trial followed. He was condemned first by the municipal magistrate and later by the Parlement of Toulouse. On March 10, 1762, he was executed by being broken on the wheel, a method which involved stripping the victim naked and tying him with arms and legs spread-eagled to the flat of a large wagon wheel, which was laid on the ground. One or two men then set about smashing his joints and bones one by one with a metal bar. Having been made pliable, the arms and legs were then woven through the spokes. Finally the wheel was raised up to a vertical position and the victim left to die in agony. Calas died protesting his innocence. Such a condemnation also meant that his family lost their civil and property rights.

Twelve days later Calais widow went to Voltaire and begged him for help. He was then sixty-eight years old and Europe's most popular playwright. Already one of the most famous men of his day, he was a leading gadfly in the continentwide agitation for political and social reform. A permanent threat of imprisonment in France hung over his head. He had recently Red the service of Frederick the Great of Prussia and settled at Ferney, an estate perched prudently on the French-Swiss border. From there he lashed out in all directions at those who caught his attention.

Voltaire's first reaction to Madame Calais plea was that her husband had been guilty. His horror of organized religion made him believe the worst of all sects. However, he investigated the case and became convinced that a great injustice had been done. He wrote to his contacts in Paris -- ministers, courtiers, parliamentarians -- asking them to intervene. They weren't interested.

This was a turning point in Voltaire's life. Perhaps the most important. He had never had a great philosophical scheme. However, he passionately desired reform and his already long career had been made up in good part of looking for the right way to force the hand of governments. He had been a courtier and a royal adviser, a playwright and an historian. Three years before he had taken up a specific human rights cause, involving six brothers whose inheritance had been stolen by the Jesuits. He now took personal charge of the Calas case and began pouring out a torrent of words in all directions.

In the process Voltaire virtually invented the idea of public opinion and demonstrated how it could be marshalled for a good cause. Instead of arguing from a high plane as the other eighteenth-century philosophers habitually did, he came down to the realities of human life. As a result he developed the idea that specific, heart-rending cases could be converted into great battles which would set standards and force widespread reform.

More important, he concentrated on the law -- on legal reform and on the fairness of its application. Of course, Voltaire wasn't the first man of letters to seek social reform through legal reform. Jonathan Swift had taken on endless cases in Dublin in the first half of the century. Voltaire, who was a great admirer of Swift, had spent three months in the same house with him more than thirty years before during his English exile. His later concentration on satirical political novels, pamphlets and poetic attacks owed a great deal to Swift. And Henry Fielding had begun his attacks on the law with a trilogy of plays in 1730. In 1749, by which time Fielding was a lawyer and a justice of the peace, he published Tom Jones, a novel that was in part a demonstration of the need for legal reform. Voltaire used the English model and English thinkers throughout most of his life as the political example to be followed.

However, the Calas case was something new. Within a year Voltaire had turned it into the talk of Europe. The misfortune of Jean Calas began to take on mythological proportions. Voltaire kept up his assault. It took two years to force a judicial review of the case. And on March 9, 1765, three and a half years after the execution, the forty appellate judges of the Town Hall of Toulouse unanimously exonerated Calas. Every man and woman in Europe could see and feel that justice had been done. The pattern had been set for the great populist legal battles, which in our century would produce the Dreyfus case and Watergate. As for Voltaire, he was no longer seen as a political gadfly. He was now the defender of Calas and therefore the defender of Justice. He went on to take up a stream of other cases over his last twenty years.

The rule of law had thus been fixed in the consciousness of the citizenry as the most reliable tool for controlling leaders and achieving both political and social justice. Only a few years before, the ideas of Montesquieu, a senior judge-turned-writer, had quite naturally been addressed to other members of the elites. Now even the complex and highly intellectual message of the Encyclopedistes had a populist reverberation they themselves didn't quite understand. Their arguments in favour of a strong monarchy bound by an inviolable legal code suddenly caused others to wonder why, since the legal codes were to be inviolable, the monarch had to be strong. That refrain had a longer history in England, but there it took on a new amplification when King George III's refusal to act in a law- biding manner provoked American gentlemen -- including landed gentry and city merchants -- into revolutionary action.

It became clear during these and other debates that the new rational public man was meant to be first and foremost a lawmaker. This was to ensure the reign of Justice, which was generally understood to mean the exercise of authority in the maintenance of right. [2] The importance of lawmaking was confirmed by the Napoleonic experience, which demonstrated that, even when a Hero was in power, rule by law was to be second only to military glory. While Napoleon was busy conquering Europe and violating the citizen's most basic rights, he was also putting his name, with the accompaniment of great pomp, to a new revolutionary legal code. It has been central to his Heroic myth that he be given credit for writing, if not all, certainly a great part of the Napoleonic Code. He was described and depicted staying up for entire nights to dictate the new standards of justice. In reality most of the Code had been in preparation before his rise to power. A committee of great legal thinkers then gave it shape. Napoleon made some late drafting amendments and, to his credit, enacted the whole package. Whatever the historical truth, the idea had been established that, while Heroes might seize more arbitrary power than an absolute monarch, they did so on behalf of the citizen. That idea is still with us.

Implicit in the new, popular crusade for lawmaking was the question of form and style. The rule of law meant that the actual formulation of the laws must be clear. Without clarity there could be no general understanding among the citizenry; and without understanding, no sense of whether right had been maintained.

It has taken two centuries for that clarity gradually to disappear, while the law has grown to become a force in itself rather than an extension of representative decision making. The swelling mass of legislation processed by our assemblies has to do increasingly with administrative methods rather than the enunciation of policy. Most of the laws relate to technical aspects of the system's development. And the sheer weight of the laws makes actual governing almost impossible. With very few exceptions, neither the elected representatives nor the citizens understand the legal structure.

Over the last hundred years, our thin legal codes doubled their thickness, then tripled, then quadrupled. As justice took hold in detail, so it seemed to become more demanding, and so further legislation was required. Along the way something peculiar happened. Our languages gradually proved themselves incapable of absolute concepts. The propositions of justice laid out in the seventeenth .and eighteenth centuries had seemed perfectly clear. The subsequent inability of legislators to write legal sentences which could capture these propositions was, at first, blamed on incomplete policy decisions. By the late 1950s, this excuse was wearing thin. Each new law, no matter how well drafted, failed to achieve the marriage of principle with application. Further laws were required to plug the holes which inexplicably appeared or to extend the regulation to areas inexplicably excluded. And each additional law created not fewer but more holes.

As the tapestry of the different Western legal systems grew in complexity, so each became less like a fireman's blanket and more like a crazy fisherman's net, which allowed all sorts of fish through -- big and small, depending on such factors as intelligence, luck and money. Criminal law, for example, proved itself not too bad when it came to dealing with amateurs, pretty hopeless with small-time thieves and unable to touch the professionals. Tax laws soon had many major corporations paying less than any employee working on their assembly line, because the corporations could take advantage of hundreds of provisions related to tax loss, special investments, write-offs and shelters, while the employees had their taxes simply deducted at source.

The legal profession began expanding by leaps and bounds in order both to plug these multiplying holes and to exploit them. Today there are 350,000 lawyers in the United States; 25,000 in Washington alone, where they devote themselves to governmental structures. In France, the argumentative onus and inquisitory role in law is only partially entrusted to lawyers. Magistrates, notaires and the Conseil d'Etat -- a bureaucratic corps devoted to cases which pit the public against the administration -- account for a large percentage of legal activities, In spite of this, the number of lawyers has approximately doubled over the last twenty-five years from 10,000 to 20,000. There have been equivalent increases in most Western countries. Swelling national legal codes represent only a small part of their work. Administrative regulations are equally important, as are new areas in multinational law. For example, the law of the European Community is now as important as that of each member state.

Thus, in the growing maze of technicalities, a cat-and-mouse game began between opposing armies of lawyers, whether struggling over criminal cases, corporate takeovers, taxation policy, environmental standards or thousands of other personal, private and public issues. Only the sides they represented made them opponents. Their skills were the same, Their methods came from the same source. The sides, however, were not equal. Those writing the laws couldn't possibly keep up with those legally breaking them, because the legislator must obey his own rules. As for the mass of lawyers working against the public interest whether for criminals, corporations or individuals with a personal agenda -- they were restrained only by the technicalities and so kept a constant lead over the legislators.

The critical mass of laws and the intricate struggles surrounding them began ineluctably to transfer real power from the people's representatives to those who interpreted the legal code. When it came to creating policy, the interpretation of law gradually became as important as that of legislating it, then more important Whatever the constitutions of the nations may say, the reality today is that judges and courts are more important legislators than the elected representatives.

This is the third element in the decline of the elected assemblies. Just as parts of the representative's power have gone to the executive and to the administration, so another part has gone to those who argue and apply the law. As the lawmakers have declined, the law itself has grown into a seamless structure. Like administration, it has become both a substitute for policy and a body on whose back policy can be made.

***

The fixation of most eighteenth-century thinkers on inviolable legal codes was produced by two factors: their desire to end the intolerable rule of arbitrary, absolute authority and their belief in some sort of social contract. Their assumption was that this contract would automatically encapsulate and defend acceptable social standards. John Locke's Social Contract had been published in 1690, just forty years before Voltaire's exile in England. For most people Locke seemed to have swept away the authoritarian origins of contractualism in the philosophy of Hobbes. Locke's approach was more flexible. And properly controlled authoritarianism didn't bother the proponents of reason. The rational, contractual approach to law seemed to them to provide guarantees for justice.

Even so, to a minority these dreams of justice, rendered absolute by the application of unfettered intelligence, seemed dangerously dissociated from the realities of human society. Rousseau, for example, reacted by attempting to reattach the new legal concepts to their roots -- that is, to humanity. "I refer to morals, customs and, above ail, belief: this feature, unknown to our political theorists, is the one on which the success of all other laws depends." [3] In the 1950s that idea was still being expressed by Learned Hand, the greatest American judge of his day and a constant advocate of social justice. Surrounded by the explosion of regulation, he wrote: "I often wonder whether we do not rest our hopes too much upon constitutions, upon laws and upon courts. These are false hopes; believe me, these are false hopes. Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there no constitution, no law, no court can save it." [4] This same ethos, balancing legal codes with a moral centre, had been perfectly expressed at the moment of America's creation, when Edmund Burke rose in the House of Commons to speak against his own country's opinion and state interest by seeking justice for the revolutionary cause." It is not what a lawyer tells me I may do, but what humanity, reason and justice tell me I ought to do." [5]

Burke approached the American Revolution in exactly the same way that Voltaire had approached the Calas case. He sought justice in a specific case, believing that any victory over the details of evil would eventually defeat it in general. But as the web of legal statutes has grown, so the chase after specific justice has, like democratic consultation, become more of a release device than one which leads to general solutions. These focused quests, particularly when they are successful, now often result in even greater injustice. Watergate was an apparently successful quest for greater honesty in American presidents and their entourage. Instead it became a manual for the use of a subsequent presidency, which engaged in far greater dishonesty without the president or his popularity being touched.

The general reaction, to legal complexity and the resulting obscurity that encourages legalistic manipulation, has been a growing desire for freestanding laws -- that is, laws rendered inviolable by a bill of rights. Where such bills already exist, as in the United States, the drive has been to strengthen them. This curious movement was created in part by the abdication of the confused and frustrated political classes. If a bill of rights would ensure the justice they no longer felt able to create themselves, then why not surrender some of their theoretical powers to a document which could? The perceived success of the American Bill of Rights lies at the origin of this argument, which has recently been successful in Canada and is steadily growing in England. Lord Scarman, for example, one of the nine Law Lords and Chairman of the Law Commission for seven years, eventually came out in favour of a British· Bill of Rights: "When times are abnormally alive with fear and prejudice, the common law is at a disadvantage; it cannot resist the will, however frightened and prejudiced it may be, of parliament." [6]

But how successful has the American Bill of Rights actually been, and in comparison to what other system? Despite U.S. power and riches, no developed country suffers from greater economic and human rights disparities or has higher levels of criminal violence. Forty million Americans are without any access to health care. Racial slums are abandoned by the authorities. In Los Angeles 70,000 young belong to street gangs which murder some 380 of their own every year, as they have each year for the last decade. [7] A higher percentage of the national wealth is in the hands of a smaller percentage of the population than in any other Western country. There are 25,000 murders a year -- a figure which grows to new record levels every twelve months. To this should be added 1.5 million violent crimes per year and 12.3 million property crimes.

Only the United States among the Western countries has permitted the return of vigilante groups to help in the maintenance of public order. There is no other way to describe the Guardian Angels who first gave themselves to the New York City subway system and are now patrolling a growing number of neighborhoods. For the constituted authorities to permit their presence, and the public to welcome it, is to concede that the legal system doesn't work at any level, from the policeman on his beat to the Supreme Court justice.

It was the Bill of Rights itself, as interpreted by the Supreme Court, which made slavery legal in the Dred Scott case of 1857. That same Bill of Rights negated the results of the Civil War by making de facto slavery legal in the form of Segregation thanks to the court's decision on Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896. Indeed, that same Bill of Rights ended de facto slavery with the Brown v. School Board decision in 1954, only after great internal debate among the judges. In 1905 the Court approved the exploitation of workers, women, children and immigrants, thanks to Lochner v. New York. It continues to find women unequal to men, in such cases as Bradwell v. Illinois or Hoyt v. Florida. In Korematsu v. U.S.A. it also approved the removal by the Executive of the constitutional rights of the American Japanese after Pearl Harbor.

This is not to say that legislatures are incapable of acting badly. Over the question of Japanese rights in 1941, the parliaments of both Britain and Canada were guilty in the same way as the American Supreme Court of racism combined with financial opportunism -- that is to say, the removal of rights, internment and forced disposition of property. The point is, however, that the Bill of Rights gave no extra protection, nor did the wisdom of the judges.

Still more important, these policy questions central to morality and humanism, central to the very nature of the citizen, were decided by an appointed body. The elected representatives thus escaped all responsibility for decisions which were essential to the moral and physical wellbeing of their electors. Worse still, so did the citizen.

Our confidence in the courts, when coolly examined, turns out to be confidence in the judges. It is a confidence based upon a reassuring vision." Unlike most others who pronounce in the public domain, judges appear to offer, and to deliver, clear and definitive answers. Justice according to law is a coin which, when tossed, does not rest on the rim. It comes down head or tails; it is clear who has wop and who has lost. The judge gives his reasons, pronounces the result and withdraws to the chill and distant heights." [8] Lord McCluskey, the senior Scottish judge, gave this description in 1986. Judge Learned Hand put it that the judge's "authority and immunity depend upon the assumption that he speaks from the mouth of others, so he must present his authority by cloaking himself in the majesty of an overshadowing past." [9] Montesquieu was the senior judge in Bordeaux in the early eighteenth century. He described the situation in his limpid manner." When I visit a country, I don't examine whether the laws are good, but whether they are executed, because there are good laws everywhere." [10] Or again, Lord McCluskey: "The judge hears both sides. He passes all the material over his own well-calibrated mind, satisfies himself how the law applies to the established facts, and pronounces judgement which determines the rights and liabilities of the litigants." [11]

All this makes the judge sound very much like someone we know. A mythological figure. A disinterested servant of power and justice. One who is indifferent to lobbying and independent from the opinion of the majority. Who tries to decide with the general good in mind.

He is, of course, the Prince. Machiavelli's Prince, but also everyman's ideal prince. He is the Goldfriend of Anglo-Saxon literature. He is Solomon and Henri IV, le bon roi and other just kings. He is, above all, the long-lost benevolent despot of the philosophers of reason. He is Frederick of Prussia, Catherine of Russia and Christina of Sweden as Descartes, Grimm, Voltaire and Diderot had hoped to mould them. He is the prince of reason.

***

That being so, the judge is precisely what the descendants of reason -- technocrats in all their forms -- have always wanted. Perhaps more important, he is precisely the sort of individual that they have laboured to make our entire civilization feel it ought to want. And in a sense they are right. If we are to have a civilization of systems so complex and unending that they avoid all normal control devices, then we also need a tyrant, benevolent and fair, who will simply say, when the system gets out of hand -- "That won't do. Stop it."

But what would be the point in accepting this sacrifice of democratic rights if the legal system and its control devices don't work? The evidence is strong that they don't. Judges have great difficulty in composing fair and clear judgments. The citizen is being squeezed out of his role as jurist. The system seems unable to judge fast enough to keep the system up to date. And worst of all, the law and its officers are capable only of prosecuting the crimes which hardly matter. The major crimes escape them entirely.

First there is the question of the judges' ability to judge fairly and clearly. The citizen might be reassured by the fact that Western courts have made a series of generous judgments over the last thirty years. However, that is a short period of time. And even in this new age of justice, their calls have been close, Between 1974 and 1984, 20 percent of the judgments of the American Supreme Court were by margins of 5 to 4. In 1987Justice Lewis Powell retired. Of forty-one cases decided by 5 to 4 during his last term, he cast the majority vote thirty-three times. He was key to decisions on both abortion and affirmative action, although he did not always cast a reform vote. His successor is less generous in spirit. As a result, in early 1989 the Court began to reverse itself on affirmative action in a series of decisions such as Wards Cove Packing v. Antonio. Most of these Supreme Court votes were also by 5 to 4. [12] According to the late reforming justice, Thurgood Marshall, the legal interpretation of the Court has now come full circle, back to the situation before Brown v. Board of Education began the desegregation process.

In 1991 the political reversal of the Court majority was complete. Thurgood Marshall became so frustrated by yet another right-wing decision that he resigned. The case in question reversed by 6 votes to 3 earlier Supreme Court decisions on the admissibility of unrelated information in murder trials. [13] No doubt Justice Marshall, then aged eighty- two, was particularly distressed by the knowledge that the pattern of future decisions was established for the next two decades. He described the situation in his dissenting opinion:

The real question then is whether today's majority has come forward with the type of extraordinary showing that this court has historically demanded before overruling one of its precedents. In my view, the majority clearly has not made any such showing. Indeed, the striking feature of the majority's opinion is its radical assertion that it need not even try.

Renouncing this Court's historical commitment to a conception of "the judiciary as a source of impersonal and reasoned judgments" ... the majority declares itself free to discard any principle of constitutional liberty which [it has previously] recognized or reaffirmed.


In a separate dissenting opinion, Justice John Paul Stevens wrote that "today's majority has obviously been moved by an argument that has strong political appeal but no proper place in a reasoned judicial opinion."

Both Justices thus invoked reason and, indeed, Thurgood Marshall opened his moving dissent with the charge that "power, not reason, is the new currency of this Court's decision-making." On one level this is perfectly accurate. However, if you take a longer, historical view, it was the rational conviction that justice can better be accomplished by judicial administration than by democratic politics which first opened the door to the use of executive power to deny justice by determining nominations solely on the basis of ideology. After all, a bill of rights, which can be manipulated for lengthy periods through the appointment for life of justices, removes the responsibility for specific political changes from the democratic process. And Chief Justice Rehnquist, in his majority ruling in the same 1991 case, quite happily said that adherence to the precedents set by the Court's previous decisions "is the preferred course," however, not when a decision is perceived as unworkable or "badly reasoned."

And that is where arguments about the nature of justice approach reality. President Reagan, his Attorney General, Edwin Meese -- who escaped on a technicality from prosecution by the courts -- and his supporters always saw the political return of the Right as happening in three stages: first the creation of an accepted philosophical position; then the winning of the presidency; and finally the "roll[ing] back, on all fronts, [of] the liberal conquest of the last half century." [14] That rollback could only be accomplished in the Supreme Court, which is why the most important decisions of President Reagan's two terms were his court nominations. It took only eight years to rebalance the Supreme Court in favour of the Right. President Bush's nominations have created a large majority. A justice usually sits for at least ten to fifteen years. That is, two and a half to four presidential terms during which he is responsible to no one except his own interpretation of the law.

The justice is therefore a powerful policymaker. This is by no means limited to the United States. In Canada, which recently gave itself a bill of rights, the now retired Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, Brian Dickson. pointed out that he and his colleagues were now the "final arbiter" of many of the major social policy questions confronting society. Dickson added, "It is power unsought." [15] Indeed, two justices have already had to resign, unable to bear the strain of this new responsibility.

And yet the power of judges is seriously hampered. They may not choose problems for consideration. They must wait for them to come to the court. They and the nation may have to wait ten or twenty years for the definitive case in any area of concern to reach one of the supreme courts. It is thus a dangerously passive way to create policy. Perhaps more telling for the citizen is the reluctance of the judges to assume this responsibility. They are themselves exposed to public judgment when they themselves feel only partially responsible. They know that our society did not begin its modern period on an understanding that the judge would be prince. They feel used by the system, like reluctant Caesars, manipulated by their praetorian guard.

The citizen's role in the burgeoning legal process is limited to jury duty. This has been absolutely central to the Western idea of fair justice. However, it never goes beyond the first level of trial. Appeals court proceedings are the exclusive responsibility of judges. And as the power of the courts grows, so the role of the jury keeps on shrinking. particularly in the common-law countries. The administrators of our legal systems have been working for some time to narrow the public's role in the meting out of justice. They seem to feel that law has become too complicated for untrained jurists to understand. Juries are therefore now considered unnecessary in an increasing number of trial categories, particularly in Britain. And the powers of juries, where they do exist are increasingly limited. Even the principle of a unanimous verdict has been put aside whenever possible.

The idea of being judged by the unanimous decision of one's peers is one of the last areas in which humanism outweighs logic. The juror brings common sense to the court, a factor which is implied by the phrase reasonable doubt. That doubt provides the citizen far better protection than any bill of rights and yet it is slipping away without a murmur of protest from the public.

When, in 1972, the U.S. Supreme Court abandoned the fundamental principle of jury unanimity for state trials in their decision on Apodoca v. Oregon, Justice Thurgood Marshall wrote in dissent:

Today the Court cuts the heart out of two of the most important and inseparable safeguards the Bill of Rights offers a criminal defendant: the right to submit his case to a jury and the right to proof beyond a reasonable doubt.... The skeleton of these safeguards remains, but the Court strips them of life and of meaning.... The Court asserts that when a jury votes nine to three for conviction, the doubts of the three do not impeach the verdict of the nine. [But] we know what has happened: the prosecutor has tried and failed to persuade these jurors of the defendant's guilt. In such circumstances, it does violence to language and to logic to say that the government has proved the defendant's guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. [16]


Put another way, our elites do not trust our judgment. The experts who have influence on law reform -- whether inside the bureaucracy, the law societies, the courts or the influential law firms -- will never put it that way in public. Instead they argue that the present system is awkward and old fashioned. The rational argument, as always, is for efficiency.

***

Perhaps these arguments would be acceptable if they carried with them a conviction that the result would be a wider application of greater justice. Even on the technical front, efficiency reforms have not solved any problems. The process of justice falls farther and farther behind the event which provokes it. Between the charging of an individual and the final resolution of the case, one, two, three, even four years may go by. If the charge is a serious one, the existence of everyone involved will slip into limbo. The delays now associated with justice send a signal to all citizens: they cannot rely on the legal system to protect them, because involvement with the courts will be a destructive, not a protective, experience.

Those responsible for law reform deny none of this. They say it is proof of the need for more drastic reforms. But their earlier changes have now been in place long enough to bear responsibility for a worsening situation. No doubt there is an urgent need for massive reform. But there is nothing to suggest that the "efficiency" sought by official law reform committees in every Western country can solve our legal problems. This sort of reform seems' to be little more than tinkering. The more fundamental problem is that the statutes cannot deal with the agility and imagination attached to major crimes because our legal systems are designed to deal with specifics. And specifics for the intelligent are like obstacles on an obstacle course, The difficult spots are highlighted. You go around them.

Periodically, however, even the intelligent make mistakes, They become overconfident or overintelligent. They become carried away by a lax or corrupt political atmosphere or by an overheated economy. And so they get caught. From the public's point of view, these captures appear to be serious assaults by the legal system on corruption and criminality in the elites. In reality they are almost accidental events.

For example, the recent "assaults" on insider trading, involving such people as Michael Milken in the United States and Ernest Saunders, former chairman of the scandal-ridden British company, Guinness, merely remind businessmen that that is how all intelligent trading is done. This is an extension of the obstacle-course phenomenon in which, for example, new taxation regulations immediately cause an explosion in creative accounting until a way around is discovered.

The American Justice Department recently finished a three-year investigation of General Dynamics Corporation in search of evidence that the company had defrauded the government during the building of nuclear attack submarines. They succeeded in finding evidence that the company may have falsified information about submarine delivery schedules and cost overruns, but the Department lacked an identifiable party to charge. Since the Navy had acquiesced in General Dynamics activities, it would have had to be included in the charge. The Department of Justice was reluctant to charge the American Navy. This was the second incident over which the Department had considered charging General Dynamics. In 1986, while the investigation was going on, the company received eight billion dollars in further defence contracts. [17]

The possibility of intentional massive fraud, by a key defence contractor with the acquiescence of the American Navy, is of national importance and constitutes a major challenge to the maintenance of public justice. But these, sorts of events, or rather nonevents, are considered so normal that they cause not a ripple in the sea of public debate. The General Dynamics case didn't even get onto the important pages of the newspapers, nor was it dealt with by the frontline journalists of national affairs. What other explanation can there be for such public indifference than that citizens no longer believe their legal system can work? And what the citizen will put up with rarely remains an urgent matter for the politicians and the press.

On the rare occasions when criminals belonging to the elites are brought to court, the circumstances always suggest that somehow a profound error has been made and that the accused, although perhaps guilty, really ought not to be there. In 1986 in the Plaza- thenee Hotel m Paris, a rich American businessman fired five shots at the Vice President of the Franco-Arab Chamber of Commerce, seriously wounding him. Their argument was over a three-million-dollar commission owed to the American, Taj Jamil Pasha, for a turnkey factory contract in Germany. Jamil was released on bail of 800,000 francs ($160,000). He returned to France for the trial three years later. The judge treated him with great respect, referred to his career at the very heart of big business and freed him on payment of a fine of 42,000 francs ($8,000). He can return to France whenever he wishes. The preceding case in the same courtroom involved a young Moroccan accused of trying to hold up a hotel with a pellet gun. He asked for bail. It was his first encounter with the law and he had already been held without bail for nine months. His request was refused and he was taken back to prison.

The scene was not very different from that in London in 1988 when the well-known City banker, Roger Seelig, arrived in court to deny the twelve charges brought against him by the Metropolitan Police Fraud Squad in connection with the Guinness case. He was freed on bail of £500,000 paid by two successful businessmen, Sir Terence Conran and Paul Hamlyn. The general feeling in the business community about the charges arising out of the Guinness affair was that, whatever had happened, it had all been good business. The charges were therefore unfair. Seelig was preceded in court by a man accused of eating a £3.95 pizza with the intention of not paying. The accused was sentenced on the spot to £50 or seven days in jail. Having been short £3.95, he was unlikely to have 50. Seelig went on to do something quite unusual. He conducted his own defence. By early 1992, some four years later, the legal process had worn him down. The judge discharged 'the jury because of serious concern over Seelig's mental and emotional health, and he found himself free without any clear legal statement being made on his case. [18]

It could be argued that the poor have always gone to prison and the rich gone free. In the Jamil case the court reporter of Le Monde was reduced to quoting La Fontaine. "According to whether you are powerful or miserable ..." [19] Equally, kings or law courts have traditionally reached out from time to time to punish a few of their elite who have become too big for their boots. Louis XIV made Fouquet, his Superintendent of Finance, into an example. Today's courts have chosen Boesky, Saunders and a few others. There is no question of justice being applied to all who may have transgressed. The courts can't handle the Row of petty criminals and murders. What would they do with half the business leadership of the eighteen developed countries?

This is not to suggest that the social disparities in Western society are now as great as they were in the seventeenth century. Or that justice is now as violent as it once was. Sentences were far more Widespread and violent than ours but, on those occasions when aristocrats and burghers did come to trial, justice was often as violent for them as it was for peasants. The question here is whether the institutions of reason have improved the equality of justice. It could probably be argued, given the decline in the incidence of treason, religious conflicts and political divisions, that the ratio of convicts from the elites to those from the poorer classes is now lower than it was under the absolute monarchs.

Moreover, there have been profound changes in the nature of major crime over the last half century. It is a truism that the Italian mafia has a major role in Italian banking and business and in the largest political party, the Christian Democrats; that the offshore banking havens, such as Bermuda, the Turks and Caicos, the Bahamas and Hong Kong, which are used by most major multinationals to reduce their tax bills, are also used by organized crime to launder their income. Most major international banks have branches in these havens. That is merely a fact. It is a truism that American banks have been penetrated by organized crime, along with whole industrial sectors, particularly the entertainment industry -- Hollywood and film distribution in particular. That is one of the explanations for the exorbitant costs involved in making American films. The charges of criminal activities against the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI) in 1991 should be seen as an exceptional occurrence brought on by the uncontrolled and extreme activities of the bank. The possibility of fifteen billion dollars in concealed losses and widespread involvement with secret service agencies was bound to attract attention eventually. The BCCI is, however, not an exception in its contempt for national laws. Its carelessness will provide a rare opportunity to examine relatively common banking procedures. The drug trade, once the family business of a few Sicilians, has now taken on gigantic multinational proportions, involving Chinese and Latin American organizations as well as the Italian. Drugs rate today as one of the largest international currency earners.

All this escapes our system of justice. The authorities are reduced to humiliating seizures of a few kilos here, a few kilos there. Occasionally, there is a "big" haul, which usually consists of a few hundred kilos -- that is to say, of nothing. No more than 10 percent of the estimated annual drug trade has ever been seized. And when a theoretically important criminal figure is arrested, it is with the greatest difficulty that the government gets a conviction or a long sentence. The 25,000-man American expedition to Panama, resulting in four hundred deaths and hundreds of millions of dollars worth of economic damage, was mounted in the name of justice to shut down a major cocaine network by overthrowing General Manuel Noriega. He was overthrown, a friendly government was installed, and the drug business went on undisturbed. As for Noriega, he and his lawyers spent the subsequent years running circles around, or rather through, American law. The end result was a conviction, hut the process of appeal will drag it all on for several more years.

Drugs aside, our authorities have failed to understand how money moves and agreements are made. Our legal codes search for proof of misdemeanors in the forms of contracts and the physical exchange of goods for currency. Organized crime operates without contracts. Without paper. Without borders. Multinationals use contracts, but these may be in any jurisdiction, including offshore havens. Our legal codes and courts are virtually irrelevant when it comes to organized crime. But they are equally irrelevant when it comes to regulating multinational corporations. The point is not that there is a moral equivalence between drug cartels and multinationals, but that our laws are meaningless when it comes to international operations, whether criminal or corporate. When the scandal surrounding BCCI's operations exploded on July 5, 1991, one of the clients named, among the drug lords, dictators, terrorists and gun runners, was the CIA. Almost immediately, Richard Kerr, the Deputy Director of the CIA, confirmed that the Agency had transferred substantial amounts of money through the BCCI, that the bank had been "involved in illegal activities such as money-laundering, narcotics and terrorism," but that the CIA had used the bank "not in any illegal way." [20] This raised two questions. What does the CIA understand "legal" to mean? And, more to the point, given that this statement may well be accurate, what do the functioning elites of the West understand by legal activity, as opposed to legal theory? Kerr made his statement while speaking to a school civics forum.

The difficulties into which our legal systems seem to be slipping have provoked renewed debate over the nature of law. Curiously enough, most of our experts -- both liberal and Right wing -- have fallen back on the argument that law is rooted in contract; the contract of the individual with society and, on a more banal level, the endless contracts which make society function. Many of them argue, as does the American John Rawls, that the principles of justice are not evident in our common sense. [21] He therefore seeks an agreed social contract. This approach might make sense if there was some hope that these contracts, high and low, could be enforced and in a manner which reflected their social intent. If not, then in place of a common sense understanding of law and of social standards, all we have is a morass of meaningless technicalities open to exploitation by experts.

There are few areas which remain reasonably enforceable. Divorce and murder perhaps retain the greatest clarity. But once we leave the specific, we discover that the whole system, turns -- in spite of our continuing eighteenth-century obsession with absolute justice -- on the assumption that the law will work because it is in some way an expression of the citizenry and the citizen therefore believes in it. The reality is, however, that the creator is increasingly the expert. And the citizens' roles as legislator and jurist have faded, so they no longer feel directly involved.

When contemporary legal wisdom speaks of law as contract, one is tempted to reply that the power of money -- legal and illegal -- thinks that contracts are a joke; both the contracts of the individual with society and those of the legal codes. They are playthings to be manipulated by professionals such as lawyers, who are trained to do so. These people use -- or misuse -- common sense and make the governments of the world look like children. Besides, at the heart of justice must be the citizens' belief in the laws they obey and their collaboration with the authorities. The actual statutes do not exist because everyone would act in a criminal manner without them. They are there to layout general social standards and, above all, to deal with a small minority who have always rejected responsible behaviour. There is an assumption in any social contract that the constituted elites are protectors -- for better or worse -- of that social agreement. The idea that a civilization could function with its elites as the principal abusers of the contract is impossible. And yet that is precisely what we have.

In many ways, with its ineffectual complexity, law has become like court etiquette of the late eighteenth century. Each man goes through the motions of acquiescence. Then those with power of any sort go away and do something quite different. And the judges preside over these formalities, like rational princes who have neither the paternalistic authority of an absolute monarch nor the populist authority of an elected leader to ensure that the social contract is respected.
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Re: VOLTAIRE'S BASTARDS -- THE DICTATORSHIP OF REASON IN THE

Postby admin » Thu Jul 02, 2015 9:48 pm

PART 2 OF 2

Heroes

The sudden appearance of the Hero at the end of the eighteenth century came as a shock to a civilization in full and relatively optimistic mutation. Bonaparte seemed to materialize out of nowhere. Neither philosophers nor those in authority knew what to make of him. They didn't understand how he could be an invention of the rational revolution. And yet they could see him being admired and eventually worshipped as the natural son of reason: the liberator of peoples; the lawgiver; the administrative reformer; the patron of sciences; the modest ruler, always in simple uniforms, who made no dynastic claims for preferment and sought to create a meritocracy. In the future society they had imagined, however, none of these qualities fitted naturally together with military coups, dictatorship maintained by violence, permanent censorship of free speech and therefore of writing and thinking, the emasculation and eventually the destruction of responsible government, the glorification of an individual, military adventurism, and the institutionalization of profiteering for those in power. Somehow Napoleon had effortlessly introduced both of the above lists.

Perhaps it wasn't surprising that this new Hero escaped understanding. In fact, the implications of the Heroic phenomenon still have not fully sunk into the consciousness of Western society. We simply accept that our expert elites prefer dealing with judges and courts rather than politicians and parliaments. The people's representatives themselves have been so discouraged by their inability to keep up with the great search for absolute answers and the rush to efficiency and modernity that they have gradually given over many of their responsibilities -- that is, the power of the people -- to the various administrative elites and to the judges in particular. This loss of practical democratic power has pushed the politicians to bolster their position by concentrating on personal appeal. That is to say, they attempt to lead through personality, a phenomenon usually known as "personality politics." These phrases have a vaguely amusing ring about them. They are reassuring. They imply that nothing more is at stake than a bit of ego from inoffensive politicians. This is so misleading as to be false. Personality is a pleasant way of describing the Napoleonic method of managing the public and from his reign onwards, it developed into the principal public tool of the new Heroic dictators.

What is it then, precisely, that contemporary politicians in democratic societies are attempting to create by using this method? Not personalities. They are attempting to turn themselves into freestanding public objects which require no supporting walls or cables such as party, policy, beliefs or representative responsibilities. They wish to transform themselves into this freestanding monolith so that the public will come to them in admiration, without intermediaries or conditions. Not admiration of anything in particular, such as policy or action. Just a warm, imprecise admiration tied to personal characteristics -- being tough, for example, or loving or caring or familiar or awe-inspiring. The politician attempts to create a sense of well-being or dependence in the citizenry.

In short, they wish to become Heroes. Not real Heroes, who claw their way to the top in the tradition of reason's first monster, Napoleon. They will settle for an imitation Heroship, in which they are worshipped for their appearance. Modern politicians are to Napoleon what Louis XVI was to Louis XIV. The sight of a Quayle or a Mulroney dressed up for the grand role does add comic relief to public life." And yet," as Naphta pointed out in Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain, "the insipid is not synonymous with the harmless." [22]

The popular success of such consciously constructed personalities may have something to do with the remarkable self-discipline they need to make. themselves over in the heroic mode, Self-discipline has not been seen as a great virtue by citizens of the West over the last few decades. In the 1950s and 1960s, it was popularly assumed to be a preference of the Right, and this misapprehension remains in the political debate. But nothing could be less disciplined than the New Right, with its romantic mythologizing of freedom, equality and individualism in order to obscure such practical policies as the legalization of dishonest speculation through financial deregulation. The New Right is even more undisciplined than the liberal middle classes, which have redefined personal freedom as the privilege not to give of themselves when it, comes to protecting or advancing the public good. Throughout the West they have gradually withdrawn from public life, claiming that politics is too damaging to their private lives. These lives tend now to be devoted to careerism, travel, holidays, sport, exercise and the caressing of a private state of mind which might be described as an obsession with their personal well-being. For both the New Right and the middle-class liberals, individualism has come to mean self-indulgence.

Such a childlike approach to the role of the citizen has allowed them to invert logic in a remarkable way. The public servant -- police officer, soldier, tax collector, health authority -- who is paid by the citizen, now becomes the enemy of the citizen. This transformation is, in part, the result of individuals feeling that they have lost control of the public mechanism. But what is self-discipline in public life if not working to ensure that one's beliefs have some effect? The tendency among Western elites is rather to evade paying taxes wherever legally possible and to pay the remainder resentfully, taking government services for granted, while grumbling about them and looking upon public servants and public services as money and time wasters. Thus our elites sink into precisely that childish, irresponsible mold which a technocratic society assumes is the real character of every citizen in a democracy.

Should we be surprised, then, that the dream of the Hero still roams so freely through the Western imagination? The Hero incarnates self-discipline. Like the suffering Christ, he is disciplined on behalf of the populace. So long as he is there to protect them, the citizenry may continue to be childish. The Hero has the mythological power to assume responsibility for our rational structures, while giving flight through his own personality to all our romantic fantasies.

The rational idea that society is perfectible can also give him the right to use violence, This chastising, punishing Hero first appeared during the French Revolution with the Jacobins under the leadership of Robespierre and Saint-Just. The immediate and effortless marriage which they accomplished between those avenging powers normally associated with the Old Testament God and the new high-rational expectations imposed on each citizen should have given an early warning of the dangers inherent in Heroic leadership. Instead the physical elimination of impure citizens has become a recurring theme. This sort of extremism had once been proper to the defence of religious doctrines. In the twentieth century, we have seen Heroic leadership on the Right and the Left justify the taking of lives on the basis of everything from racial purity to economic and social methodology. Only Heroes are strong enough to establish a virtuous society through bloodletting.

Whether paternalistic or avenging, the Heroic argument is that the public stage remains chronically empty. Therefore only extraordinary leadership can save the day. This is the standard justification for a coup d'etat "in the public interest." Perhaps the earliest example of the rational coup was Oliver Cromwell's dismissal of the Rump Parliament in 1653 with the aid of his soldiers and a populist slogan -- "You have sat too long here for any good you have been doing. Depart, I say, and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go." He, the virtuous leader, claimed to speak for the people better than the people's representatives. His actions brought about a political, economic and social revolution. However, because they were encased in strong Puritan themes and because the British monarchy was subsequently restored with most of its superficial trappings, the historic image of these events has been confused. It was left to Bonaparte, with his military investiture of the elected assembly on 18 Brumaire, to crystalize the idea of the Hero's virtuous obligation to carry out a public-interest coup against the people's representatives:

What have you done with that France which I left you in full expression of its genius? I left you peace and I come back to find war! I left you with victories and I return to find defeat! I left you the millions of Italy and I return to find laws of pillage and the people in misery! What have you done with a hundred thousand Frenchmen I knew, my companions of glory? They are dead! This cannot go on. [23]


The modern false Hero tends not to lead troops into elected assemblies. However, he has retained all of the Hero's themes: the incompetence of the assembly, the chronically empty public stage, the need for extraordinary and virtuous leadership. Virtue is regularly redefined to reflect fashion. Sometimes it refers to honesty, sometimes to personal virtue, sometimes to devotion to the people's welfare. Over the last twenty years, it has tended to refer to the virtue of personal enrichment.

Politicians know that if they can only get up onto the public stage and stay on their feet, they will be able to give the impression that they are filling the stage by the very presence of their personality. Of course they will not be filling it and so the Heroic mythology of emptiness will stay in place, thus making their presence seem even more essential. This conundrum is to the twentieth century what the indivisibility of the Holy Trinity was to the Middle Ages or the nature of predestination to the Reformation. As always, the successful installation of an unsolvable paradox at the heart of public affairs means that those who hold power can find justification for almost any sort of action.

The very survival, in the heart of modern false Heroes, of the themes established by Cromwell and Bonaparte means that the social forces which originally produced this phenomenon are not dead. Just as one Hero once drew forth another and the emergence of Heroes prepared the way for false Heroes in their image, so the disappointment provoked by these superficial imitations may in turn encourage the emergence of another real one.

The popular mythologies of television, film, videos, novels, comics and advertising are now given over to unnamed strangers who ride into town or to little guys who become champions against all odds or to wise visitors from other civilizations or to solitary soldiers who defeat armies. Ronald Reagan struck gold with the repeated invocation of his own line from a movie about Notre Dame football coach Knute Rockne and his dying star player, George Gripp, Hero of the turf, whose last words to his teammates were that they should go out and score." Win one for the Gipper!" caught the essence of our wistful obsession or belief that we are, in Leon Bloy's words, always waiting for HE who will come. That the language is insultingly hokey only makes the phenomenon worse. The obviously ridiculous has somehow become palatable.

Part of our difficulty in maintaining a sense of the dangers implicit in Heroes, whether true or false, comes from the separation of the heroic from the Hero. Rarely has there been such a complete divorce of a word from its meaning. Born as it is of courage, heroism turns on self-sacrifice and humility. It is a sacrifice which comes with no guarantee that the gesture will help anyone. And as the military example shows, only rarely does heroism bring victory. The hero's survival is an accident, because the essence of the heroic act is submission to unlimited risk. In other words the heroic act is perfectly irrational.

The rational Hero, on the other hand, is ego unchained; god on earth; the golden calf; whether a general, a tennis player or a politician. He is the colossus whose shade eases the uncertainty of all those who gather below. He is the emanation of the dreams of those who crowd together at his feet. He is their unearned and unattainable expectation.

The Hero is thus the great destroyer of individualism. In this era, which we claim belongs to the individual, we dreamily watch and admire bevies of Heroes in all domains in a way no civilization has ever done. Settembrini, in The Magic Mountain, is perhaps the greatest evocation of the man of reason. He considers himself an individualist. But, as the questioning voice of the ordinary man in the novel points out, "to be that, one had to recognize the difference between morality and blessedness," which Settembrini certainly doesn't. [24] It was their inability to recognize that difference which caused the disciples of reason, while in the very process of creating the new moral individual, inadvertently also to create a new version of the "blessed one" they thought they had just finished striking down. In effect, they had combined the mythological powers of the knight, the monarch and the deity to produce a new earthly divinity.

***

For two centuries now we have been living with the rational Hero. Born fully formed in the person of Napoleon, he sprang out of the confusion which swept Europe at the end of the eighteenth century. Napoleon was finally dethroned in 1815 and died six years later in exile. Two decades after that first burial in Saint Helena, organized mythology caught up with the phenomenon. The German philosopher Hegel had already written of "world- historical figures" who break the established mold and change history. But it was the Scot Thomas Carlyle who laid out in 1841, the year of the triumphant return of Napoleon's body to Paris, a complete concept of the modern saviour in his book On Heroes, Hero Worship and the Heroic in History. His approach was fawning, indeed worshipful. And with phrases such as the "the strong just man," he successfully inserted this new invention of rational dictatorship into the age-old mythological structure of heroic leadership. Suddenly the likes of Napoleon were being represented as natural descendants of the earlier hunter, warrior, and martyr heroes, who had played a practical and often essential role in their simpler, more direct societies, It also followed that the new rational Hero was a necessary type of leader.

Generations of historians have quibbled over the details of what is the properly heroic role for modern leaders; but they have left in place the assumption that modern Heroes are part of a single evolution through history. As a result, for the last hundred and fifty years, every revolutionary, general and beer-hall conspirator has been able to invoke antecedents running from Julius Caesar and various barbarian tribal leaders -- real and imaginary, such as Vercingetorix, Siguror and Siegfried -- to chivalrous knights, Joan of Arc and frontier Indian fighters.

Seven years after Carlyle's malevolent contribution, the first major false Hero appeared. He was Napoleon's nephew. A physically awkward weakling and an incompetent conspirator, who tended to panic under stress, he had neither talent nor experience on the battlefield. He managed instead to wrap himself in his uncle's Caesarean aura and to pass himself off as a dashing and romantic leader during the presidential election of 1848. His principle contribution to the Heroic profile was a genius for public relations. Thus he replaced his uncle's practical skills with the illusion of those skills. It could be said that he invented the idea of the Hero as actor. In 1851, he used his power as President to carry out a coup d'etat and a year later was Emperor, all this again in imitation of his uncle.

Napoleon III subsequently made a fool of himself on the battlefields of Italy, where he abruptly abandoned his Italian allies because the sight of blood had upset him. In 1870 he was decisively defeated by the Prussian army and crept away to exile in England. Nevertheless, the manner in which he had initially taken power, the subsequent eighteen years of highly visible grandeur and his squashing of practical democracy with massive programs of administrative reform and public works all combined to create the model for future false Heroes.

Napoleon III had been defeated by the genius of the Prussian Chancellor, Bismarck, and by a relatively new Prussian General Staff. Eighteen years later these servants found themselves serving a new Emperor, Wilhelm II, who was bombastic, of limited intelligence and filled with self-confidence. He was given to dramatic gestures, dressing up and stridency. His misfortune was that his royal powers were severely constrained by a reasonably buoyant democratic structure and impressive social institutions. He dreamed of stripping all that away to return to the absolute power of his ancestor Frederick the Great. However, Wilhelm didn't resemble Frederick, who had been an austere, withdrawn and almost monklike individual, endowed with military genius and boundless intellectual ambitions. Wilhelm's actual role model was the modern Hero, as defined by Napoleon and imitated by Napoleon III.

In their style, he solved his political problems by carrying out what amounted to a coup d'etat from within. In 1890 he fired Bismarck, installed servile chancellors in his place and gradually destroyed all limits on his own personal power. He then reigned as he wished for a further twenty-eight years. Curiously enough, he was bolstered in his approach by Max Weber, the leading German thinker of the day, who opposed the Kaiser's methods but wrote continually about the revolutionary role played in history by charismatic Heroes. Only the disastrous reality of World War I was able to cut through the illusion of Wilhelm's leadership.

In the meantime other, lesser sorts of false Heroes had been popping up throughout the West. Comic-opera conquerors like General Boulanger. Mystical generals like Kitchener, whose aura disguised limited talents. A slow and therefore barbarous general like Ulysses Grant was able to gather the Caesarean mantle convincingly enough around himself to win the American presidency. Equally incompetent staff officers, such as Foch and Haig, later covered their bureaucratic methods with dashing attitudes, thus transporting the false Hero into the realm of absolute internal contradiction.

It was, however, only in the 1920s and 1930s, 115 years after Napoleon, that two false Heroes were able to perfect the imitation of the real. Of the two, Hitler was the more astonishing phenomenon. What our civilization has retained from that experience is not what it pretends to have retained. On the surface we remember Hitler as a monster and tell ourselves that men like him must never again come to power. In reality, however, we have noted that he was highly successful. A small, ugly, illegitimate, lower-class, failed painter rose to a glory not seen since Napoleon Bonaparte. And yet Hitler did not rise to power by defeating Germany's enemies. He wasn't even a particularly skilled conspirator. Instead, like Napoleon III, he combined a genius for public relations with the phenomena of secrecy and police power, which had been slowly developing since Machiavelli, Bacon, Loyola and Richelieu. Hitler took this science of obscure manipulation to new heights of professionalism, while disguising its shabbiness behind his public relations screen of Heroic glory and purity.

Here, truly, was the little guy who became a champion against all odds. He was the ultimate illusion. Here -- if you put aside the specific events of his career, his racism, his violence, his mental instability -- is the model which has been retained by the image makers of today and indeed by rational civilization. For example, if one compares the public style of contemporary political leaders with that of democratic politicians before World War II, they have very little in common. The old politics tended to be dowdy. It tended towards groups of men on podiums behind long tables engaging in lengthy political evenings. There was a reassuring middle- or lower-middle-class air about most of democracy. Even the rising forces of socialism adopted those conventions and. concentrated on issues as opposed to leaders. At its best the style was slow and dreary. At its worst there was an atmosphere of smoky rooms, corruption and ward-heeling.

The contemporary political style only begins to make sense if it is compared to the Hitlerian method. We have become accustomed to the high, spartan podiums from which a single, dramatically lit leader speaks while surrounded by a darkness in which large crowds have been assembled. Modern political conventions or rallies are primarily derived from those pf Nuremberg. We now accept as normal the spectacular and officially joyous celebrations, involving massed flags, music and projected images of the leader. In day-to- day life that individual is now routinely and alternately presented as a withdrawn, august figure or, at the other extreme, a man of the people engaged in direct populist encounters.

Between these two images lies the reality of democratic politics. And yet modern leaders carefully avoid being seen in protracted serious conversations or negotiations with lower- level public figures. Increasingly they avoid those encounters even behind the scenes. Lower-level officials are sent to represent the leader, who is held back for essential or scripted sessions. At public meetings forty years ago, leaders tended to sit out onstage along with the other speakers, waiting their turn. Now they are kept out of sight and marched in Heroically at the last and most dramatic moment. In their other role, as direct representatives of the people, they are shot, as if from a mystical cannon, directly into shopping malls or fish factories or barbecues where the hands of the people can be shaken.

This high-low imagery is tied to the conversion of the leader into some sort of sexual image. Various methods are used. For example, there is the prerational religious and monarchical equation of power with potency, which Napoleon used so effectively. There is also the suggestion -- perfected by Hitler -- of restraint or self-imposed purity to illustrate a personal sacrifice in the service of the public.

Some or all of these elements can be found in the political campaigns and governing methods of most contemporary politicians. It cannot be said that these are merely superficial deformities. The process of election and the government's ongoing relationship with the population are both central to the democratic system.

What then, are we to make of the modern Heroes who sincerely attempt to serve the public good? Perhaps the simple answer is that they are not modern Heroes but belong rather to a prerational tradition. This does not mean that their actions will be understood in a prerational manner. Instead they will find themselves in constant conflict with society's expectations of them. For example, even fanatically honest men have found it almost impossible to resist the deifying needs of our times.

Garibaldi was probably the most famous man of the mid-nineteenth century. Brilliant guerrilla fighter, champion of just causes around the world, the man who made united Italy a military and emotional reality, advocate of reforms which have only recently become realistic possibilities, he found himself constantly at the centre of change. He also felt constantly obliged to flee public affairs and take refuge in isolated places in order to resist the personal implications of his Heroic activities. [25]

The son of a fisherman in Nice, he began a confused naval career by serving various powers on the Mediterranean. This culminated with his participation in a republican mutiny against the King of Piedmont. Garibaldi was twenty-seven. His flight led to South America where, for twelve years, he joined and eventually led rebellions against Argentinian and Brazilian dictators. By 1848 he was back in Italy and began in earnest his struggle for Italian unity. He was neither a nationalist nor a patriot as we now understand those terms. He did not believe in the .absolute virtue of nation-states or racial groups. He saw them only as interim tools for achieving social justice. By justice, Garibaldi meant such things as worker rights, racial equality, religious freedom, female emancipation and the abolition of capital punishment.

This meant that although he was struggling on the same side as King Victor Emmanuel of Piedmont and his prime minister, Count Camillo Cavour, Garibaldi didn't hesitate to attack them whenever they left the path of justice. His was above all a populist voice, raised to defend the interests of all people. On the other hand, each time his military genius gave him power, Garibaldi promptly handed it over to constituted authorities. The most famous example was his 1860 lightning conquest, at the head of one thousand red-shirted volunteers, of the large Bourbon kingdom that stretched from Naples to Sicily. No sooner had he made himself Dictator of the Two Sicilies than he handed the whole territory over to Piedmont in order to force the creation of a united Italy. He then withdrew from the public fray to his simple house, out on the island of Caprera, between Corsica and Sardinia, from which he emerged periodically over the next twenty-two years to fight for various reforms.

Garibaldi, whatever his eccentricities and impossibly elevated standards for public action, never took advantage of his military successes and the public's adulation in order to advance his personal interests or to seize power. It is sometimes argued that he was outmanoeuvred by venal politicians. But that is a point of view which primarily reflects the thinking of our civilization. We expect a Hero, however noble his cause, to seek power; in truth, we require him to want power. The reality is that, although Garibaldi raged against the politicians' manipulations, he refused to play their games and left them free room to manoeuvre. His refusals were not feints designed to strengthen his future position. Given the obsessions of our times, they simply increased his aura as a Hero approaching divinity.

And so Italy is filled with hundreds of thousands of relics left by the great man in his passage from town to town. In the municipal museum of Cremona, for example, like pieces of the Cross, a few objects under glass are tied together with a red ribbon. These include a splinter from a door in his house on Caprera, along with a piece of granite and dried flowers from his tomb. Beside this is another glass case, containing what appears to be the dried baby finger of a martyred saint. It is a cigar butt which the Hero had smoked in Cremona. The object is carefully labelled by hand:

Avanzo d'un sigaro che G. Garibaldi
fumara sui Torrazzo il 5 aprile
del 1862, raccolto e donato al Museo
da Giovanni Bergamaschi.


These relics lie about Italy like a promise that the Hero will return to earth. Thus, while Garibaldi resisted all the worst temptations of rational society, his example couldn't help but create the hope that another Hero would follow who would be the best of men. A leader who could carry the dreams of the people but also make them work. In other words, someone who could fill the mythological role of Carlyle's "strong, just man."

That Hero appeared forty years later in the person of Mussolini, who was Garibaldi's exact opposite. The expectation of rational society is that the Hero will assume power. Sooner or later someone with his own agenda comes along and does just that.

At the heart of the problem is our idea of the individual who is "the best." It is a concept which damages our general understanding of what civilization can accomplish. Attempts to do better or to widen our knowledge in the arts or science Or elsewhere are often described as the pursuit of excellence. This is a practical, indeed a humanist approach towards civilization. The search for the best, on the other hand, is an abstract and arbitrary business, which has its origins in warrior societies and idol worship. The man who is the best in whatever domain, is in effect, Hero for a day.

A society which mistakes the worship of the best for the pursuit of excellence will have difficulty focusing on established precedent and established procedure. These are swept away in the emotion of the Heroic. And so, acts which are unacceptable in a democratic society -- false heroics, for example; or the manipulation of institutions, even of the elected assembly -- become mere transitory problems when a leader successfully assumes the cloak of the Hero. In the circumstances it seems to be a small price to pay. And so, before the advancing Hero and false Hero, the morality and social conventions of democratic society fade away.

***

There is nothing in official Western dogma which identifies the Heroes, false Heroes and Princes, particularly the princes of law, as important factors in our civilization. Laws, constitutions, open and free elections, responsible assemblies and governments -- all these are intended to determine the rules by which we govern ourselves and are governed.

The control of the leader by the citizen is not, however, primarily dependent on laws and constitutions. These are theoretical expressions of a relationship. The reality of rational structures imposes a bureaucratic or an emotive relationship.

Citizens inevitably find themselves in a pyramidal relationship to the Prince. Structure and expertise guarantee the Prince superiority. The Hero, true or false, good or evil, governs thanks to an emotive trick, in which he is not chosen as an integrated, practical element in society, but is annointed as a mystical leader. The annointment may well take the form of a vote, but then Napoleon demonstrated from the very birth of the Hero that voting in an Heroic context will negate democratic common sense.

There is nothing original about a civilization which celebrates and maintains a fictional self-portrait for its own reassurance. Rome maintained the fiction of a republican citizenry defended by an all-powerful Senate long after the emperors were in control. Most European countries continue to think of themselves as the product of racial and cultural unity, when they are generally patchworks of conquered tribes and defeated minority cultures. The United States thinks of itself as the prophet of egalitarianism, when it is among the least egalitarian of the Western nations. None of this is of great importance so long as the state continues to function in a reasonable manner.

There is, however, a very immediate danger when a civilization is unable to recognize the nature of its leadership and to understand its origins. This invites unattainable expectations and a profound misunderstanding of the mechanisms by which orders are given and obeyed. The result is a tendency to swing erratically from manic and manipulable optimism to confused disappointment and pessimism, from adulation for those in office to contempt. In the absence of a commonly held sense of what constitutes the clear, fair and successful exercise of power, the desire for something mystical called leadership grows into a haunting and hypnotizing refrain. In the process the citizens lose their self-respect and sense of direction, thus acting in the immature manner that the Princes and Heroes expect of them.
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Re: VOLTAIRE'S BASTARDS -- THE DICTATORSHIP OF REASON IN THE

Postby admin » Thu Jul 02, 2015 9:49 pm

15. The Hero and the Politics of Immortality

On Easter morning one man became the envy of the human race. It was not so much the rising as his advance knowledge that he would rise which made all so envious. This underlying myth of Western civilization remains central, even in a largely post-Christian era when such questions have slipped increasingly into the subconscious. Time, after all, is the essential human condition, and the knowledge that it will one day cease to pass is the essential human fear. It is not dying which upsets the individual but ceasing to exist. We assume that accepting death on Calvary, while difficult, was made easier by the knowledge that it was, after all, only a three-day affair.

For other men and women, death remains unacceptable because of the surrounding uncertainty. If only this uncertainty were removed, says an. officer in War and Peace, his men would go into battle without fear. Even if the answer to the question were that after death there would be nothing, the fear would have lost its power. And this despite our uncertainty having been transformed into the certainty that we are, after all, in Martin Luther's words, "just so much excrement passing through the rectum of the world."

There is a general and pervasive pattern to the way men meet the problems of meaninglessness and uncertainty. They create ever-more intricate societies to soften the blow of death by simulating a physical and social eternity on earth. Fighting against death, Camus said, amounts to claiming that life has a meaning. Unfortunately, it also reveals a fear that life does not have a meaning.

Men who thrust themselves into the leadership of these societies betray an exaggerated determination to deal with that anxiety. Unlike normal citizens, who carry on this struggle in the bosom of their families or of their limited communities -- or within their own hearts - the public figure deals with death out on the public stage. While our equipment for seeking immortality consists of our families, beliefs and careers, the public man's equipment consists of us. That he wishes to live in this way tells us something about that man, and therefore about the direction in which he might try to lead society.

The argument that religions and indeed societies are no more than calming devices for anxiety-ridden mortals is a little too easy. On the other hand, the promise by Christianity, Islam, even Buddhism of some sort of life after death, must have calmed the populace and thus made governing easier. While rebellion or revolution are the reactions of the cornered animal, belief in any sort of afterlife removes this need.

In the West, of course, God has been dead for some time. What remains is religion as social belief, which is at best a moral code and at worst social etiquette. A real belief feels to the believer to be a natural state and does not respond to questioning. That is one of the reasons we have so much difficulty dealing with the Islamic world. They don't want to discuss fundamentals. They are not interested in a rational analysis. They believe the way we once believed. Not only do we find this incomprehensible and frustrating, we also find it troubling, because their certainty is a reflection of our own past.

We and our leaders have been surviving for a while now in societies which do not have any escape routes through belief from anxiety. This may be one of the explanations for the childish hysteria of the last few decades over economic management theories such as nationalization, privatization and free markets. The death of God was supposed to release mankind from absolute obsessions, so that we could give ourselves to rational analysis. Instead the new structures have simply taken the old absolute obsessions which were tied to the soul and applied them to our economic lives. For example, the free market may be a good, bad or insufficient idea, but, in any case, it is just a crude commercial code. Now it is regularly equated with or given credit for or even precedence over the freedom of man. But the freedom of man is a moral statement on the human condition, both in the practical and in the humanist sense. To equate it with a school of business is to betray a certain confusion. An unconscious unease.

We have, in effect, replaced beliefs with systems, and this has created a new kind of calming device which proposes eternity on earth. The web of Western rational society offers the individual a fixed place as an expert in a self-fulfilling and apparently eternal structure. The very lack of clarity, the lack of clear goals and conclusions, the very ease with which the structure weaves endlessly about us is what makes it resemble the eternal bed of nirvana. While many complain that they feel trapped in the maze of modern civilization, their complaints rise out of the emotional comfort of that stability.

The leader is the one static element in society. He is the one who, whatever the civilization, must deal with his personal insecurity through interplay with the people he leads. If there is any difference between running our society and running another, it is precisely the formlessness of ours. The maze may offer the reassurance of the eternal, but unlike earlier societies, rational structures make it almost impossible to give a sustained direction to the civilization. Seen as a whole, Western society is profoundly inefficient. Those who lead it cannot help feeling that it lacks an inner tension. They want to push it about. To reorganize. To make it respond to needs. They wish to lead, and to do so they feel they must put tension into the organism.

The leader carries all of our confusion with him as he attempts to climb above society in search of a clear view which would indicate the right direction. There, on his imaginary mountain, he stands alone, suffering the personal anxiety of freedom. He watches us dancing aimlessly below, half struggling with mortality in our comforting maze. He can see we have a certain reassurance, lost in our earthly eternity. But how is he to get his own reassurance if he cannot make all of us and the structure itself respond to his efforts?

Leaders have always suffered from these anguishes. Hadrian, trying to make sense out of a tired Roman Empire, or Pope Paul III, faced by the confused interests of the Church during the Reformation, must have felt the same. Today's leader, operating in the late Age of Reason, has a particular problem. There has never before been anything as complex as our society. The leader quite naturally feels that he somehow hasn't climbed high enough -- a bit higher and he will finally be able to make out the pattern. But all the constraints on modern leadership, proper to the parliaments and the administration and the courts, are there precisely to prevent him from climbing too high.

The fear of failure will inevitably come over him, the fear that if society refuses to respond, his life will have no meaning. And the greater that fear, the more likely he is to mistake himself for a composer gazing down upon us as if we were random notes waiting to be composed. If he has great talent -- even a narrow genius for military affairs or histrionics -- he may create for a brief moment what he and the population believe is music -- a sort of mystical sound which seems to rise out of eternity. The deeper he can penetrate into the animistic roots of any society, the more he may convince its citizens that this music will capture as much of the future as it has released of the past. And in that moment there will be a fusion between the populace and the leader. That fusion is like a Zen moment -- instantaneous and eternal. Long after it is over, the individual will remember what it was like to be part of eternity. As for the particular -- Napoleon who composes the tune, he is -- given the impossibility of using the word god in the modern world -- a Hero.

But the individual, by giving himself to this moment and to the Hero, betrays himself utterly. These experiences of satisfaction through ecstasy seem inevitably to lead civilizations deep into a sea of injustice and often of blood. That is why justice is not about fulfillment or rising to heroic heights, but about restraint and careful attention.

The philosophers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries thought that the message of reason was precisely such restraint. But while they held back the satisfaction of the ego with one hand, they dealt out the explosion of egocentrism with the other in the form of the mythological Hero, the god of reason.

The Middle Ages had offered the leader and his subjects quite a different view of eternity, perhaps because of the plagues sweeping across Europe and the repeated breakdowns of order, with armies of mercenaries constantly on the move like human shadows of the black death." No other [age] has laid so much stress ... on the thought of death," Erik Erikson wrote." An ever expiring call to memento mori resounded through life." [1] Death was placed before each person's eyes in a sustained and graphic manner which we cannot imagine.

To die was to escape out of a violent world of sin and temptation into the hands of God; The methods ensuring escape were clearly laid out, including detailed remission procedures if a rule were broken. Even methods which would put a man farther on the credit side were carefully elaborated for the simplest of minds to follow. They were like riders on an insurance policy for entrance to paradise. The growth of Indulgences eventually destroyed the credibility of this whole process, even for the most credulous of men. But in the earlier stages, they had believed.

These medieval attitudes contrast sharply with our own. We have fewer plagues but more wars and of a far bloodier nature. Our approach is to hide death. It is another of our new secrets. There is absolutely no general conviction that death is something to be faced. Instead we place our quest for eternity on the material level. Life is devoted to working, preparing, saving, driving ourselves towards something undefined. The process of our movement through the system gives us the sense of being somehow here forever.

Since our age is technological, most people add to their material obsession a devotion to defeating disease. In the background lurks the idea of immortality. If five years can be added to a life, why not ten? And if ten, why not ... ? The culture surrounding old age has been changed to the point where its vocabulary is filled with the promise of a new youth. Phrases such as "the golden age" have emerged to obscure the realities of physical decline. Charles de Gaulle, as always out of step with the conventions of his time, said old age was a shipwreck. Of course, the individual must attempt both to survive and to make use of that survival. It is the obscuring of the inevitable process which is so new and so peculiar. Not only, it seems, should we not prepare our minds for termination, we should, as the moment approaches, create a whole new set of illusions in order to avoid the relevant thoughts.

The modern Hero's power comes from this obscuring of our mortal destiny. We live a half lie and that opens even the most sophisticated among us to the kind of elementary emotional manipulation which would have been laughed off the stage in a more direct civilization.

When President Reagan stated in 1982: "We have never interfered in the internal government of a country and have no intention of doing so, nor have ever had any thought of that kind," people did not break into titters of embarrassed laughter and say out loud, "Hey, we've done it 48 times in Central and South America alone!" Instead, they said to themselves, Yes, we are a good and freedom-loving people. The Grenada operation came shortly after. When the Socialist President Mitterrand converted France's electoral system to proportional representation in order to divide the Right -- by enabling a neo-Fascist party to win seats in the Assembly -- while claiming that he was doing this to strengthen democracy, very few people were outraged. After two years of social disarray as a direct result, he was reelected, with a strong majority. When Brian Mulroney stated that President Reagan was his close and good friend and thus susceptible to his influence, people didn't howl with amusement and nudge him -- "Brian, he has trouble remembering your name."

What is going through the minds of these leaders and citizens? Clearly there is some collusion. Neither side is lying, because the element of deception is missing. Self- eception, then? But the actions in these episodes don't have the ring of self-deception. They are too open and guileless.

Is there a flaw, then, in their memory patterns? Certainly the manner in which the Western individual remembers does seem to have changed. There are now two kinds of memory. One is related to structures. Each structure is self-fulfilling and self-perpetuating. The memories they produce are therefore internal, logical and unattached to the outer world. The other sort is eclectic: one-off memories. People. Places. Events. This is the memory of a McLuhanesque world in which there is no sentence structure and no order. The mind soars and dives, like a gull over a vast municipal garbage dump.

What is missing is linear memory -- that is to say, the historical view. We may remember the event of two days ago, but cannot remember the passage of the two days. All words are neither true nor false without this linear pattern in the mind. They are merely words, well or badly said by people who are liked or disliked. Without an ordered memory, civilization is impossible. The weight of the words, their value and even the sentiments attached to them are lost.

The leader on the mountain, anguished by his own uncertainty, sees all of this. He feels the weightlessness of words. He notes the loss of memory. These two things together translate into a withering of the citizen's ability to judge clearly. This makes it more difficult than ever to govern well. On the other hand, it becomes far easier to compose dances of confusion and darkness. Dances of the Hero's ego.

The citizens are not without defences. Their common sense remains intact. They can simply refuse to respond to the worst forms of leadership. They can imprison the leader in a frustrated limbo by limiting their relationship to the level of parody. But in such an aura of confusion, society is always seconds away from not dancing at all or from dancing to the tune of a leader who has the full genius of the dark side.

***

As a child Adolf Hitler had wanted to be an architect. He carried a small museum of his adolescent architectural projects about with him -- all the way, in fact, to the besieged bunker where he committed suicide. He spread the idea of architectural grandeur throughout his Reich.

But from the very beginning of his political ambitions, there was a destructive drive which people couldn't make any sense of. They attempted to explain his characteristics analytically, as if they were dealing with a normal person who suffered from specific flaws: he was anti-Semitic; he wasn't a democrat; he frenetically flipped between charm and fury. Because this was the very first unleashing of a Hero both complete and false, they didn't think to look upon him as a wholly imaginary being. The manner in which he was conceived, as a single deformed reflection of the German people, designed to exploit their desperation, escaped the parameters of established political thinking.

His destructive. drive grew as the forties progressed, displacing his creative, "architectural" persona. Albert Speer, who had been in charge of the German war industry, tried some twenty years later to rehabilitate his own reputation by claiming that he himself had managed to delay the release of Hitler's destructiveness until the last days of the war." He was deliberately attempting to let the people perish with himself. He no longer knew any moral boundaries: a man to whom the end of his own life meant the end of everything." [2] Speer's analysis was almost perfect. It wasn't defeat, however, which pushed Hitler to an apocalyptic vision of himself. The Final Solution had been decided in January 1942, long before the tide of the war had turned. And the massacre of the Slavs, to make room for Teutons on the lands east of Germany, was already under way. It was Hitler's success which allowed him to give in to his own sense of his powers or, rather, of his rights. And when the tide did turn against him, that sense was simply aggravated.

To maintain the energy of the constructive Hero is a tiring business. Creativity is limited by time and by effort expended. It is constantly reliant on others. It is not so different from the Godlike act of creating children. This can be done, slowly, by animal methods involving nine months of natural development and a commitment to twenty years of training. The process is serial and limits the quantity. The satisfaction is greater for a woman than for a man, who contributes only a bit of liquid for a few seconds and can never even be certain that the drops involved were his own. For a dozen years Hitler harped on about the importance' of architecture and pored over ambitious drawings. He had absolute power over planning and spending as well as having an architect, Speer, as his chief economic adviser. And yet only one of his great building projects was completed -- a new Reichstag which was scarcely used.

Destruction is the other power of God, equal to creation in many ways. Above all, it is easier and faster. Between creating life and taking it away, the Hero invariably settles for the latter. It is, if nothing else, more immediately satisfying.

Hitler came to see himself as embodying all of the German civilization -- not just the government, but the race, culture, history and mythology. Therefore, when he ceased to exist, all would cease. There would be no eternity after his departure. Erikson said of Hitler that he had "an almost pitiful fear ... that he might be nothing. He had to challenge this possibility by being deliberately and totally anonymous (his actions in earlier life); and only out of this self-chosen nothingness could he become everything. Allness or nothingness, then, is the motto of such men." [3]

In this context, concepts of morality disappear. The Hero takes everything upon himself and removes any need for society's definitions of guilt or of the inviolable rights of individuals. Jean Genet, a convicted murderer-turned-existentialist philosopher and writer, carried this idea to its maniacal conclusion. In The Thief's Journal, he wrote: "Acts must be carried through to their completion. Whatever their point of departure, the end will be beautiful. It is because an action has not been completed that it is vile." [4]

It follows that actions are the only possible expression of the self. There is nothing beyond the self. And the more intense the act, the greater its beauty. The most beautiful act, therefore, is murder. It is indeed the greatest act. Having killed God, man must replace him. And there is no easier way for a man to prove himself God than by taking another man's life. "If there is a God," Nietzsche cries, "how can one tolerate not being God oneself?" And if there isn't, the same assumption of divinity is even more necessary, In theory, the Hero may choose between creating and destroying. In practice, destruction is the only realizable choice.

In Genet's play The Balcony, men come to a brothel where they can pretend to have the function they have always wished to have. This is the ultimate statement on rational structure and man's reduction to a functionary role. Dressed as judges, generals and bishops, the brothel's clients talk of "mirrors that glorify;" of being "reflected ad infinitum." They are delighted to be the reflection of someone else's eternity. The main character in the play is the chief of police. He controls everything, but no one knows him. He is the rational man of power, operating efficiently behind the scenes with such tools as secrecy and manipulation. No one has ever come to the brothel asking to play him. His only desire is to be a source for other people's reflections, He lives for that day. And when it comes, he says, "I shall be not the hundred-thousandth-reflection-within a reflection in a mirror, but the One and Only, into whom a hundred thousand want to merge." He will then "go and rot in people's minds." While waiting for that day, he builds himself a fantastic tomb, hollowed out beneath a red marble mountain, with rooms and niches and, in the middle, a tiny diamond sentry box. He will bury himself there for eternity while the reflecting world revolves around him. [5]

Some seventeen hundred years ago, during the period which lasted from the loss of belief in Roman deities to the victory of Christianity, there was an explosion in the number of gods and spirits competing to fill the void. In the nineteenth century, while Christianity tried desperately to recover from the effective death of God, there was an explosion in the worship of an endless panoply of saints. The Hero has multiplied in our day with that same assurance disguising confusion. And our endless reaffirmations of individualism on closer examination reveal themselves to be little more than the terrible confusion of individuals seeking to find their reflections in role models. These political and military leaders, terrorists, capitalists, medal winners and stars are, arranged about us in an unconscious hierarchy of Heroes who dominate our imaginations and hopes to an extent that we can never admit.

Even Genet's fanciful idea of an eternally reflecting tomb has already been constructed wherever a Hero has survived long enough to be succeeded by reflections. Generalissimo Franco had a shaft dug to the exact centre of an inaccessible mountain. There a seventy- metre-long granite gallery of cathedral proportions was hollowed out. It took thousands of civil War prisoners ten years to fulfill his dream. The whole mountain was surmounted by a five-hundred-foot-high steel cross. Franco lies exactly below the shaft, in the centre of the tomb. His friends from the civil war -- his primary reflections -- lie buried around him.

Napoleon's tomb in the Invalides is based on the same principle. Mere humans stand in the Church of the Dome on the austere white floor, bare of all seating and decoration, and look up at the most beautiful dome in France. Around them in a circle are chapels containing the tombs of Napoleonic and more recent French marshals. Directly below the dome, a great marble well has been hollowed out and lined with a dozen enormous statues of Victories. In the centre a massive, curving tomb of red porphyry holds the body of the original Hero. Like Egyptian pharaohs.. who lived forever, he is encased by several coffins -- tin-sheeted iron inside mahogany inside two layers of lead inside ebony inside oak. And all those in the marble mass. He lies as if at the vortex of a cosmic cone ascending into heaven.

***

This is not so very different from the case of the twentieth century's three great stuffed men. The idea of publicly displaying these theoretically dead revolutionary leaders mayor may not have been their idea. The cooperation of their immediate successors -- that is to say, their immediate reflections -- was in any case required and they did indeed arrange for the embalming and enthronement of their Heroes.

Are there particular godhead characteristics to be noted in their appearances? Lenin's shedding beard and ever-more-waxy complexion are hardly impressive. Mao's obesity is a serious impediment to credible immortality. When he comes into view, there is a momentary pause while the Peking crowds are caught between a giggle at the thought of the taxidermy involved and a respectful gesture appropriate to the Buddha. He lies, after all, at the centre of a great mausoleum, whose floor plan is copied exactly from that of a Buddhist temple. He lies where the Buddha ought to be sitting or lying. As for Ho Chi Minh, his asceticism was an example to all Heroes hopeful of preservation. The moment he comes into view -- again, the layout is that of a temple -- the Hanoi crowds are awestruck. His skin lies like prosciutto upon his bones, as if he had not died but been hung and slowly dried. He appears to be napping. His specially built mausoleum is the most impressive building in the otherwise dilapidated city.

There is a fourth Communist leader on display; perhaps -the most evocative of the contemporary Heroes. Georgi Dimitrov mayor may not have put a match to the Reichstag in 1933. He was put on trial for doing so and, although acquitted, became Hitler's excuse for shutting down the pretend world of democracy and entering into the eternal void of his own ego. Dimitrov survived prison during World War II and went on to become Stalin's reflection in Bulgaria during the late 1940s. He did for Bulgaria what Hitler did for Germany -- he liquidated democracy. In 1949 he died.

Stalin offered the Bulgarians the use of his official embalmer, the one who had done Lenin. Mister Sbarsky, the taxidermist, was the first of a new priesthood, empowered to confer immortality. His work on Lenin was an historic act. His work in Sofia on Dimitrov confirmed a modern principle.

That principle first emerged late in the nineteenth century, when the well-preserved bodies of a number of early Catholic saints came to the attention of Rome's mythological machinery. Soon the bodies of other long-buried or even lost saints began popping up throughout Christendom, As if to counter the growing rumours of God's death, they were all put on display in churches. The sight of these demigods, miraculously preserved, as if ready for bodily assumption on the Day of Judgment, was intended to help win people back to the Christian idea of immortality. The Church didn't stop at that. It sensed that the technological twentieth century would turn upon concrete proofs and so set about stuffing and displaying newly dead saints.

There isn't much difference between Saint Vincent de Paul, suspended in glass over the altar of his church on the rue de Sevres in Paris, and Lenin, Mao, Ho or Dimitrov. All five must have known that, as Heroes, something like external exhibition awaited them. However, Saint Clare, the friend and supporter of Saint Francis of Assisi, would have been horrified to think that -- six hundred years after her death in modest simplicity and absolute acceptance of mortality -- she would be dug up and put on show in the crypt of her church. Marble steps have been laid on top of her rough stone so that the public may climb down in glory to a double-barred grille on the other side of which she lies. A nun, whose face is hidden by a thick veil, repeats endlessly: "E il corpo vero di Santa Chiara." ("This is the true body of Saint Clare.") Clare would probably say -- "So what!" -- and make them rebury her body. She would be doubly horrified to discover that the chanting nun feels that she herself exists in part because Saint Clare's body is there. The nun would be upset if someone pointed out to her that she was acting like a Communist.

As for the four embalmed revolutionary Heroes, the spectacle they have become might embarrass them on an intellectual level. But we can be almost certain that it would give them great subconscious satisfaction; at least as much satisfaction as Napoleon and Franco would get from their own idolatrous display as Christian altars. All of these men operated in the .age of the Hero and they are among the happy few to have become officially immortal. To become a Hero is to accept, if not desire, that the people will want your immortality. Of course, if they decide they no longer wish it, you may be abruptly mortalized and shoved underground forever; or for a time. Lenin is now entering that C1ubious phase. By all the historic standards of earthly deification, the citizens who pass before such altars can see that their great man is a god. The message which the authorities intended to send, by laying out these men exactly as they have, is perfectly clear.

Beyond that, the public mayor may not think that the Hero is a satisfactory guarantee of immortality. He is, however, a rare concrete indication of its possible existence. As a result the edge of death is theoretically softened for the millions of individuals who are exposed to these One-and-Only Heroes - on display or encased in marble -- whose reflections they might wish to become.

The democratic process offers no equivalent softness. Participation by the citizen in a democracy is a down-to-earth business which has very little to do with grandeur and Heroism. But our complex rational systems draw individuals into fixed positions as experts. The reassurance felt by belonging in this way contradicts the very idea of participatory democracy. Political initiative therefore shifts over to the leaders and they in turn encourage the ever-more-passive individual to dream. Heroic leaders always encourage the people to dream, as if the capacity to dream were a positive political attribute. In truth, it has more to do with unleashing our fears, which then swell into the limitless realms of fantasy.

And yet, when we look at our own leaders, they don't resemble the Hitlerian Hero. These are not Napoleons marching across Europe. But the methods they use and their assumptions are those of the Hero. False. Heroes, no doubt, but they manipulate the tools of power in a parody of greatness, Most of the time there are no public indications of this peculiarity. Then abruptly, during the 1991 Iraq war, they all slipped effortlessly into the bellicose overstatement of hard, bitter war leaders.

To dismiss this as inoffensive is to miss the point. Our rational structures are not carrying us slowly but surely towards balanced, open and straightforward leadership. Instead, they carry us ever deeper into a world where the assumptions of leadership may lean towards parody, but the parody in question is that of the Hero.
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Re: VOLTAIRE'S BASTARDS -- THE DICTATORSHIP OF REASON IN THE

Postby admin » Thu Jul 02, 2015 9:51 pm

PART 1 OF 2

16. The Hijacking of Capitalism

When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean.
-- Humpty Dumpty


Nowhere has the role of Lewis Carroll as linguistic architect of the twentieth century been more apparent than in the world of big business. Nouns, verbs and adjectives are flung about with great enthusiasm, anger and sincerity, leaving mythological trails so evident that not one of them. needs to be explained. Capitalism, free enterprise, risk, private ownership -- all these phrases and many more, when heard or read, produce a nod of instant understanding and either approval or disapproval.

Thanks to this clarity, we have been able to carryon an endless public debate over what form modern society should take. Should we release the creative/selfish forces of free enterprise? Or should we protect/ coddle/free the citizen in the face of the challenges/dangers of risk?

These questions have been further simplified by a tendency to use interchangeably the phrases free world and free enterprise. George Bush, and Ronald Reagan before him, spoke of free markets and free men, in that order. While some Western leaders are more discreet in their wording, not many of them, even the socialists, would give much energy to disagreeing with the principle.

Such whirling about of rootless words has created the illusion of a real debate. And that illusion is so convincing that we rarely examine exactly who is arguing with such fervour in the name of capitalism. The curious thing is that very few of them are capitalists. Instead, there are bevies of corporate managers, financial managers, financial speculators and service providers. Still more curious, if you begin to question them, you discover that they are horrified by the personal commitment and personal risk which is central to capitalism. They are, in effect, the prophets and defenders of an economic system which they reject.

What we have done in the West is throw three elements together as if they were part of a natural family: democracy, reason and capitalism. But they are not even natural friends. The businessmen who speak so aggressively today in capitalism's defence are, in reality, the product of its defeat by reason. This product is by no means unidimensional, however. The speculators, for example, are a sign of reason's failure. The service providers seem inoffensive enough. All they do is fill a void in our economy. The danger lies in our believing that they are a new solution, rather than another sign of our problem. As for the managers in capitalists' clothing, they are not entirely a disaster. After all, during the periods of their rise to power, we did establish some sort of general social compromise, shaky and uneven though it is.

However, the gap between the capitalist illusion and its reality is now so great that the practitioners and indeed the civil authorities have difficulty making economic decisions in a sensible manner. Their problem begins with the democracy = capitalism equation. Running democracy and capitalism together as a single idea is a wonderful Marxian Joke. That is to say, in the tradition of the Marx Brothers. Neither history nor philosophy link free markets and free men. They have nothing more to do with each other than the accidents of time and place allow. In fact, free enterprise worked far better in its purer state, when it operated beneath friendly, authoritarian government structures. Unquestioned political stability suits the embracing of financial risk. Authoritarian governments can ally themselves to money without fear of conflict of interest. They can do things faster. Compromise less. Democracy, on the other hand, is subject to ongoing political and social compromise. It tends to want to curb activities of all sorts, business- elated or not, in order to protect the maximum number of people.

Thus capitalism's moments of greatest glory were under the benign authority of early Victorian England, before universal male suffrage and before child labour laws, work safety regulations, the right to strike and contractual employment. It flowered under Louis Philippe, the businessman's King, who even dressed like a company president; and again under Emperor Napoleon III, who removed the universal male suffrage which had been established by the short-lived Second Republic. It did well under Kaiser Wilhelm II, who cut back on the liberal reforms of his father and of Bismarck. The last Russian czar presided over the greatest expansion of free enterprise the world has ever seen. And in the United States, capitalism was healthiest and happiest in the period before white male universal suffrage in 1860, and then again in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when large segments of the population were without a vote because of the waves of immigration. Even after becoming citizens, these newcomers remained politically docile during the long process of integrating their particular community into the mainstream of society. American capitalists were at their most dissatisfied from the early 1930s to the 1970s -- the period when there was the most active participation by the citizenry in public affairs, In spite of a prolonged economic crisis, business interests have been happier during the last two decades than at any time since the day before the collapse of 1929. This happiness coincides with a decline in the percentage of voter participation to levels not seen since the arrival of male universal suffrage. Nor is this pattern limited to the West. The most vibrant new centres of capitalism to appear over the last few decades are Singapore, Taiwan, Thailand and Korea. All four are governed through sophisticated and cooperative authoritarian systems.

Widespread confusion between the freedoms proper to democracy and those proper to capitalism further confirms that business leaders no longer understand their own ideology. And yet the credo has been public knowledge for several centuries. Capitalism involves the use of capital, not simply its ownership. You cannot own an abstraction. Only the owning of something renders capital concrete. Property, for example. Or a factory. Gold for a long time seemed interchangeable with capital, but it was in reality a concrete good which came to be the measure of capital because it was portable.

However, the ownership of something thanks to the transferral of capital is not enough to make the owner a capitalist. After all, the ownership of inanimate objects, such as land or buildings or gold, existed long before capitalism. Those who increase their capital by trading in such commodities are merely speculating on the value of goods. To make money out of an increase in their value is not a capitalist act.

Capitalism is the ownership and use of the concrete but dynamic elements in a society -- what is commonly known as the means of production. A capitalist is someone who produces more capital through the production of the means he owns. This necessitates the periodic reinvestment of part of the capital earned into the repair, modernization and expansion of the means. Capitalism is therefore the ownership of an abstraction called capital, rendered concrete by its ownership of the means of production, which through actual production creates new capital.

However, capitalism as conceived today tends to revolve around something called the profit motive, even though profit is neither a cause of capitalism nor at the heart of the capitalist action. Profit is a useful result of the process, nothing more. As for the ownership of the means of production, this has been superseded by their management. And yet, to manage is to administer, which is a bureaucratic function. Alternately, there is a growing reliance upon the use of capital itself to produce new capital. But that is speculation, not production. Much of the development of the means of production is now rejected as unprofitable and, frankly, beneath the dignity of the modern manager, who would rather leave such labour and factory-intensive "dirty" work to Third World societies. Finally, the contemporary idea of capitalism grandly presents "service" as its new sophisticated manifestation. But the selling of one's own skills is not a capitalist art. And most of the jobs being created by the service industries are -- with the exception of the high-technology sector -- descendants of the pre-eighteenth-century commerce in trade and services.

The service industries cannot even claim to be at the creative end of capitalism - that is, the front end, which converts abstract capital into production. Instead, they live off the results of capitalism. Politely put, they are the tertiary sector, which, in simple terms, means they are economic parasites. The consultants, public relations advisers, financial advisers from bankers to brokers and all the other expert mercenaries are new versions of the courtesans who hung around the kings and nobles. The Master of Royal Fireworks. The Concierge (official candlelighter). The Mistress of the Bedchamber. The moneylenders. Mixed into these service industries are those who speculate in goods. The property developer and the owner of large commerces are the most prominent examples. The property developer existed long before capitalism and will exist long after. He is usually linked to financial institutions, which deal in the abstractions of capital, or to those which administer inanimate goods, such as notaries or government departments. Donald Trump and Robert Campeau existed in the Middle Ages and in the nineteenth century without being considered capitalists. Solvent or bankrupt, they are not capitalists today.

On August 13, 1987, the New York Stock Exchange celebrated five straight years of strong growth. The Dow Jones Average had risen 245 percent since 1982. The London Stock Exchange 300 percent. The Toronto Stock Exchange 200 percent. The Paris Bourse 300 percent. And the Tokyo Exchange 1800 percent. In that same period real economic growth in nonfinancial -- that is to say, capitalist -- areas had been minimal. Unemployment, already high, had continued to rise to record levels in Europe, had dropped a bit in Canada and quite a bit in America. The American improvement had depended on a willingness to ignore the lowering of employment standards and the use of part-time labour to count as full-time labour. To put it bluntly, in the 1930s, women who took in washing to get by were not heralded as job-creation success stories, but our service-industry economy measures differently. In that same period the debt crisis put most Western banks into technical bankruptcy. The number of American banks to actually go bankrupt rose every year to a 1987 record of 208, the highest since 1933. Ten percent of the remaining banks (fifteen hundred out of fifteen thousand) were on the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation's list of troubled institutions. A whole category of smaller financial institutions, the thrifts or savings and loans, were virtually bankrupt. Annual business bankruptcies continued to rise throughout the West, setting new records every year.

The only production sector to show serious growth was armaments; noncapital goods which do not themselves create further production. National debts continued to soar; currencies to fly up and down. The trade in real goods was so troubled that the GATT (General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs) talks were stalled and most nations were turning towards protective measures. And yet the stock markets continued their record rise.

The purpose of a stock market is to provide a regulated forum in which current owners of the means of production may either sell to new owners by putting their own shares on the market or expand their means of production by raising additional financing through the issuing of new shares. A rise in the market should be a sign of the rising value of the means of production, thanks to increased sales and new investment. Neither of these things happened between 1982 and 1987. And yet, enormous sums of capital poured into the market. Where did the money go? It seemed to disappear into some sort of paper-printing maze in which managers and speculators chased each other around in a directionless circle with nothing in mind except control of the management levers and the maximization -- indeed, the artificial creation -- of profits. It was perfectly appropriate that the American secretary of the treasury, the German minister of the economy and both the Canadian and the French ministers of finance during much of this period were ex-stockbrokers or ex- merchant bankers. And that the star, of what many people came to see as a generalized, irresponsible American corporate managerial style during the 1980s, was Ross Johnson, a particularly close friend of the Canadian prime minister. [1]

Modern capitalism could justify this general situation only by claiming that the maximization of profits is at the heart of the process. But if maximized profits really have become the justification for the existence of a capitalist economy, then services and financial speculation really are the new capitalist enterprises. And if that is the case, then capitalism, which was one of Western man's greatest innovations, has been debased today into a fancy version of old-fashioned speculation, in the tradition of the South Sea Bubble and the John Law inflationary bust. When Black Monday, the crash of October 19, 1987, came and nothing particularly dramatic happened to Western society, it did indeed seem that capitalism, in its modern form, had become so divorced from the means of production and obsessed with paper profits that it had also become irrelevant to the real economy.

***

Perplexed by the apparently unsolvable nature of various economic problems, the citizen turns to the capitalist in search of some explanation. The capitalist inevitably chides him for failing to use his initiative and for not working hard enough. This lecture is followed by the invocation of a personal moral rigour which turns on risk, competitiveness, market forces and individualism. Finally he refers the citizen to his government, as the party responsible for inflation, unemployment, stockmarket crashes and restrictions on each man's freedom to act. The citizen turns to go as instructed, but as he does his eye is caught by something strange in the capitalist's appearance. This, he suddenly realizes, doesn't look like a man in command, an owner, a risk taker. He does indeed project assurance, but there is no fire in his eyes. He is too sure of himself to be really responsible. And his clothes are too uniform for an individualist. There is no edge of creativity about him, nor the wear and tear of having built an enterprise. His words are too much part of a universal patter on free enterprise and the profit motive. Suddenly, the citizen understands -- this is not an owner of the means of production. This is an employee in drag.

He is chairman, president, chief executive officer, chief operating officer -- he is anything he wants to call himself, but he doesn't own the place. He has been hired to do this job. He has a contract guaranteeing him employment under set conditions, cars, first-class travel, pension plans, holidays, club memberships. He is an MBA or an engineer who has a stock option for two thousand shares paid for by the company. Even those aren't his. They're just a legal way to save him years of tax on extra income. He'll sell the shares on retirement and walk ~way with the cash. And if, for some reason, he were fired, his contract would include a settlement provision to make him a reasonably rich man.

If the citizen were to insist on meeting the real capitalist -- the owner -- he might find himself being humoured by the chairman, who would insist that the owners are just stock speculators. Besides, there are 173,000 of them. If asked how, then, this modified capitalism can control and give direction to the managers, he might launch into a long explanation of the role played by his board of directors and his annual meetings. The citizen realizes immediately that the annual meeting is a toothless affair. Because of the impossibility of assembling the 173,000 shareholders, management will exercise the majority of the votes. As for the board of directors, the game is more subtle.

Most directors are nominated indirectly by the management. Most directors take on the job not because they wish to control the company, but because sitting on the board is prestigious. It gives them good contacts. extra power around town and extra income. They do not devote themselves to ensuring the company is making the right decisions. They just keep their eyes open for basic errors, More important, they watch for opportunities for themselves -- not so much of the insider-dealing sort. but more subtle opportunities. Service contracts. for example, which might be given to other companies they are involved in.

And even if they did wish to be diligent. how would they do it? The management accompanies each resolution presented to the board with thick briefing books. These resemble the briefing books prepared for government cabinet committee meetings. These company briefs have been prepared by dozens, perhaps hundreds of experts on the proposed matter. What is the director to say? Whatever it is, the management will have a reassuring answer. Four or five managers will be board members. If national assemblies. with the authority of universal suffrage. are unable to control governments despite the glare of public debate, and cabinets are unable to make government structure move. despite the prodding of parliaments. how could a few part-time directors succeed, when limited to private debate and deprived of even the organized support of the shareholders?

Besides, management works very hard to turn directors into captives. They are paid quite handsomely. The fees in the United States are now between thirty and fifty thousand dollars a year. And the more money the directors will take. the more the managers can pay themselves. There are also all sorts of perks. Meetings in agreeable places. The cost of bringing spouses thrown in. Presents from time to time. Access to the company's services, whatever they might be. Banking institutions almost routinely offer their directors access to Swiss or other offshore accounts. The offer is not illegal. but the director's use of it will unavoidably be. The director who takes up the offer thus forfeits any right to make trouble on the board. He becomes a member of the club. One of the boys. And the bank management has enough information on his private affairs to control him if necessary.

The assumption that board members exercise effective authority over corporations is one of the central fallacies of contemporary capitalism. The board of directors was never designed to be a control unit representing 173,000 shareholders. It was designed to be a gathering of all or most of the owners. As such, it was a body of real authority. One or more of the director-owners was almost certainly running the company. That sort of situation still exists. but it is limited almost exclusively to smaller corporations.

Free enterprise throughout the West is dominated by employees, more and more of them products of business school training or an equivalent. Like bureaucrats. they do not lean naturally towards the inventive approach -- neither inventive investment, nor developing goods, nor winning markets by selling goods. They specialize in developing systems within which they can operate and in producing tight programs which are modelled upon the case study approach. They are invariably eager to change circumstance arid to force it into a set pattern.

An individual who stands out, disagrees or takes risks is a danger to such systems and is effortlessly, unconsciously sidelined. The top management of large Western corporations and multinationals has been chosen by the system -- because systems have an inbred logic -- for their mediocrity. There are exceptions, of course. But there are exceptions to everything. Andre Malraux described the early stages of this phenomenon half a century ago in Man's Fate. Gisors, the Shanghai manager of a French-owned company, explained his position: "Modern capitalism is much more the strength of organization than that of power." [2]

These managers have no power of their own. They play the corridors the way eunuchs once played the maze of alleys in the Forbidden City. Their interest lies in career advancement and this can best be done by delivering immediate proofs of success. Their management style is therefore based upon rapid returns. The quarterly report syndrome is proper to this approach. There must be constant and immediate signs of success and these must be structured in order to encourage the stock market and to throw constant sops to the board of directors. Long-term planning, basic -and long-term investment, both to improve the established production and to create new production, are the last thing they want.

There are managers who wish to stay with a company, in which case they are stolid and terrified of risk. There are managers who fly upwards from company to company, keeping one step ahead of their own activities. They need immediate results. Neither of these types is interested in the aggressive exploitation of the means of production. Neither sort is attracted to the production of things nor to their sale. Things are concrete. Managers, by nature, take what can only be called an intellectual approach. Reason is their sign. They can know and explain without touching. To touch is to slip down into a lower world. It is almost as if they fear the reality of capitalism; fear that the dark, satanic mills might take hold of them and squeeze out their illusions of grandeur, leaving them prisoners of the means of production for the rest of time. No doubt they sense accurately that the reality of the factory world is not easily susceptible to abstract manipulation.

A great deal has been said about the inflexibility of Western industry when faced by that of Japan or of Korea or of other new capitalist nations. In rather the same way that the staff officers, who ran World War I, blamed their disasters on the old army class, so the technocrats, symbols of the future, have managed to blame the failures of Western business on the old industrialists. But the old owner-managers of the West haven't been around for decades. At most there are a few pockets of survivors here and there. It is the technocrats, the MBAs in particular, who have been so lacking in flexibility that they have ceded much of the Western means of production to the other civilizations. And it is they who have taken the success of these other cultures as a proof that Western capitalism had to die and be reborn in a clean, urban, nonindustrial form.

The lesson they have drawn is clear: if lesser civilizations will assume the hands-on work, the more advanced West can concentrate on working with its brain. Thanks to the proliferation of business schools, this self-interested approach has almost instantaneously been converted into a philosophical rationale. Rosabeth Moss Kanter at the Harvard Business School writes as a leading thinker of the "post-entrepreneurial company," as if this were an intended and welcome result of business evolution, She sees companies marrying "the best of the creative, entrepreneurial approach with the discipline, focus and teamwork of an agile innovative corporation." She writes confidently of "the coming demise of bureaucracy and hierarchy." [3]

Kanter's critique of the big, old American corporations is in many ways accurate. But the changes she imagines are dependent on the fact that much of the entrepreneurial and unbeatable competition from the Third World owes its success to social injustice. This does not seem to have made an impact on the intellect of management thinkers or of managers in general. In their exciting role as capitalists they talk endlessly about the innate value of competition. To be competitive is their equivalent of morality. They treat competition as if it were a universal value enshrined within a single definition. Thus they miss the essential relativity of competition. Of course a nation which uses nineteenth-century social standards as a basis for industrial production will produce cheaper goods than one which uses middle-class standards. But even the rolling back of social policy sought by the New Right in the United States and Britain will not reduce production costs to Third World levels.

For example, heavy industries, such as steel, have been hard hit by Korean production. In 1979, the American industry employed 435,000 people. Ten years later, it employed 169,000. [4] Why is Korean steel so much cheaper? Before the recent worker protests, Koreans were putting in the longest average work week in the world -- fifty-seven hours. In return they earned 10 percent of a Western salary. Since the Korean cost of living is quite high, the workers live in slum conditions. Unions have been virtually banned and strikes forbidden. The work conditions are reminiscent of nineteenth-century England. In 1986, 1,660 workers were killed on the job; 141,809 were injured. [5]

Given the modern manager's devotion to an international "standard" of competition, the effect of the marginal improvement in social conditions brought about in Korea by persistent and violent street demonstrations has been to weaken Korea's attractiveness as a capitalist producer. The citizen who listens to the modern rhetoric of free markets and free men would assume that a bit more social justice and democracy are good things. The cause of Western civilization has been advanced. The manager, however, sets aside rhetoric when it comes to specifics. From his point of view, Korea is now less competitive.

For those companies that wish to sell in the North American market, it is now far more competitive to produce goods by using the southern American States and northern Mexico in tandem. Social standards in the American South were never high, but they are now being reinstitutionalized at a low level by industrial investors in search of cheap, unsecured, and unprotected labour. A few hours farther south, across the border, is a massive assembly area called the Maquiladora zone. The southern American states function at half the wage levels of the north, of Canada and of Europe. The Maquiladora zone functions at mid- nineteenth- century levels of child labour laws and factory safety regulations. Wages are a tenth those of the developed world. Dangerous chemicals and explosives can be processed there without the expense of protection for the worker or the environment. A product manufactured between Tennessee and Mexico is now more competitive than one manufactured in Asia.

The effect of this tandem is to put downward competitive pressures on the northern United States; on Canada, now linked southward by a continental economic integration pact; and on other countries who wish to compete in these markets or to compete with their exports. The Maquiladora experiment has been so successful that corporations have pushed the American and Mexican governments towards a full-scale economic pact. The Mexicans hope that this will lead to an influx of capital, new jobs and an improved economy. But the interest of the investors is primarily in cheap, unsecured labour and unregulated industrial production standards.

Why would sophisticated, technocratic employees seek aggressively to destabilize the structures of their own countries in order to give comfort to the sort of social systems which their fathers rejected as criminal less than a century ago? And why would they or we entrust any part of our fundamental needs to unstable societies which have not yet gone through the economic and political turbulence which surrounds most industrial revolutions? No doubt the managers in government and industry looked at their flowcharts and thought there was no other way. It apparently did not occur to them to question the effects of this strategy on their own society.

They have been comforted by a seemingly endless parade of business school professors and economists who spend large parts of their lives on contract to corporations in one way or another. These men have provided an intellectual rationale for economic masochism. At the heart of their analyses one inevitably finds the marketplace. Any integrated view of society, social concerns, morality, democracy and indeed capitalism is necessarily pushed to the margins. This theoretical "marketplace" and the accompanying theoretical "competition," which is required by anyone who wishes to survive in it have both been defined by such people as Michael Porter in a manner which assumes the end of any evolved social contract. Porter is a professor at the Harvard Business School, the author of several books on competition and is having an important effect on business and government in several countries. [6]

The complexity of the financial formulas and mathematical models which he uses suggests that a sophisticated advance is being made in business methods. In reality, what Porter and many others are recommending is a return to savage economics. Beneath the patina of their highly professional approach is a deep pessimism about the ability of civilization to determine its course. It follows that we must passively subject ourselves to market forces and reserve all our sophistication for reacting to these brutal "natural" forces, rather than act to control or direct them, even if the result of such passivity is the destruction of our society.

Curiously enough, the arguments used by these economists and business school "thinkers" not only obscure the underlying economic effects, they are also extraneous to the corporate life of endless meetings, aimed more at gathering information to be used against those who know less than at actually doing something. There is only so much time and for an executive much of it goes to seducing protectors, inserting oneself into the system, building fortresses of additional structure and initiating plans to be fed out through the structure. The-comedy of corporate life, unrelated as it is to corporate production, has been widely satirized.

The manager is willing and even eager to put the advances of Western society at risk because he is not anchored by reality. He doesn't own. He isn't really responsible. He doesn't like the concrete of capitalism. His world is an abstraction. Without the anchor of reality he has no idea of how far to go. A capitalist monster of the nineteenth century might or might not have been held back by the public consciousness that he was responsible for what he did. The more he acted against the perceived interests of his own society, the more his reputation suffered. To the extent that his ambition was to rise in society, he might eventually have reined himself in, in the Andrew Carnegie manner, and attempted to counterbalance his reputation by doing some good. The manager, on the other hand, deals in capitalist theories, not capitalism. (By abstract standards the Mexicans are more competitive than the Germans.) He presents this "truth" as an inevitability. There is a frigidity -- or, again, an asexuality -- in the way he insists that destiny is the slave of theory and he with it.

In many ways he resembles an eighteenth-century nouveau-riche bourgeois trying to pass himself off as an aristocrat. He goes further than any duke would go in his mannerisms, his clothes and his snobbery. The manager is the bourgeois gentilhomme of capitalism.

These peculiarities appear in even the most solid of corporations. Boeing, for example, is not only the largest constructor of planes, it has been probably the best. This quality was rewarded by great success, to the point where the company sold $30 billion worth of airplanes in 1988 and still had one thousand back orders. To meet this demand it went on a massive hiring binge, to the extent that some forty percent of the workers soon had less than two years' experience. There was enormous pressure on everyone to keep the assembly line going and going fast. The result was an abrupt drop in quality. Crossed wires on warning systems. Crossed wires on fire extinguisher systems. Thirty cases of backward plumbing. Engine-casing temperature sensors installed in reverse order. A disintegrating wing flap on a plane's first day of service. Metal fatigue disintegration of a 737 in flight. Disintegration of part of a 747 in flight. The U.S. aviation agency began reviewing Boeing's assembly procedures. [7]

Why did the executive employees of Boeing not realize that their production pace was too fast? Why do they still maintain that it is not too fast? A reasonable executive would conclude that the company would do less harm to its own reputation by limiting production than by turning out craft of a lesser quality. Why do they feel that speed and quantity are paramount? Why do they think that precision work can be exponentially multiplied? Driven by an abstract logic and obsessed by maximizing profits, they seem unable to pace themselves, even in one of the finest high technology corporations in the world. Neither the system nor the managers possess the restraint proper to common sense.

***

One of the most obvious innovations of the managed corporation has been the division of currency into two sorts -- apparent money and real money. Apparent money belongs to the corporation but is used by the employees, directly or indirectly, for their personal lives. Real money actually comes out of the individual's pocket. Some people have only real money. Blue collar workers, for example. Or the self-employed. Or writers and painters, apart from the odd grant.

The executive classes of the West -- particularly from industry, but increasingly from government -- live large parts of their lives on apparent income. They eat, travel, phone and drive without even considering real cost, because that cost is limited only by their professional level. It is difficult to imagine a quality urban restaurant which does not earn at least half its income from apparent money. At lunchtime, the figure would be closer to 100 percent. City hotels would be empty without the corporate managers. The quality car market would shrivel away without the company car. Sports clubs would be bankrupt without company memberships. A whole category of more expensive air travel -- Executive or Business Class -- has been created for managers who have not quite reached the top. If there are any real capitalists on board - that is, those spending their own money to do business -- they may well be in the cheap seats.

There is no way of calculating the costs to the corporations -- and therefore to the shareholders who are, after all, the owners of the corporations -- of this apparent money. The manager's official "perks" or expense accounts are a small part of the total. The rest are integrated into the self-justifying management method of the corporate structure. Apparent money does not double executive personnel costs. The figure is more likely to be three or four times the real salary level. In terms of financial costs to the shareholder, the industry manager is out of control. The more he profiteers from his company, the more he feels and indeed declares himself to be a capitalist. The further he moves up the corporate ladder, the more he spends apparent money in quantities which bear no relationship to the interests of the company or to the needs of the business he is doing. The size and contents of specific offices, for example, are only details of the size and architecture of corporate buildil1gs. Does the decision to cover a new company headquarters with marble, for example, relate to corporate needs or to management's ego? The very shape of office towers is now routinely altered to pump up the executive's false sense of importance. Capitalists have corner offices. More and more office buildings are therefore built, at considerable extra cost, with zigzags in their facades. As a New York architect put it: "The more corner offices you can claim to have, the more marketable a building becomes." [8]

At this very moment tens of thousands of employees are flying above in corporate jets. This is as it should be if these private planes are helping them to do more and better business. The likelihood is that they aren't. There are rarely such imperatives of split- second timing in big business. In fact, there usually isn't much of a rush in the completion of big deals. They tend to be rather slow and complicated. There are certainly no real production requirements forcing the executive up into a Lear Jet. The commercial system is perfectly adequate for a corporate timetable. There are between 20,000 and 60,000 business aircraft in North America. A small jet sells for between three and twenty million dollars. This does not include such costs as pilots, insurance, landing fees and fuel.

It is as if these men believed that moving faster, seeing more people and going to more meetings replaced .the real process of industrial production. Perhaps their panicked rushing about is an attempt to simulate economic growth.

"Our attitudes towards growth are at the heart of the present dilemma of industrial society," the businessman and environmentalist, Maurice Strong, has written." This is the disease which has spread through the body of modern technological societies." [9] Our obsession with profit has driven us to fall back on the idea that rapid growth is a characteristic of capitalism. It is true that the technological advances of the last century led to great growth. The gross world product has increased twenty-one times since 1900, the use of fossil fuels nearly thirtyfold, industrial production fifty times. [10] The resulting goods were consumed by both a dramatic rise in general standards of living and a population explosion -- from 1.6 billion to 5 billion in eighty years. That most of the production came from the West further exaggerated the effects of this growth. We sold our products to the whole world in return for their cheap natural resources. These combined circumstances created a run of exceptional profits. And so in the subsequent era -- our own - devoid as it is of linear memory, the business community began to treat fast growth and massive profits as basic characteristics of successful business, when it was, in reality, a short-lived anomaly.

The developing world's population continues to grow in a way which impoverishes rather than enriches them. The population level of the West has paused at saturation level. Our production needs can't help but pause as well. This is only a catastrophe if capitalism is treated as a machine which must produce constant and giant profits. Were we to return to more standard expectations, we would find it easier to accept modest returns.

The riches of the real capitalist -- the owner-manager -- came from his ownership and his reinvestment in that ownership. He devoted himself to production. He did not necessarily seek to increase his profit every year. Given low inflation rates, he was quite happy with a return of 5 to 7 percent. What he did seek was stable markets for his goods. Nothing returns to what it was, but it is important to understand the desire for solidity of the average real capitalist in order to judge better the frenetic and aimless leaping about of the modern manager and speculator.

These managers have now convinced themselves that profit is the essential nature of capitalism and that they are the new capitalists. From there to a disassociation of corporate profits and managerial income was but a step. Over the last decade, senior managers have gradually assumed all of the capitalists' robes and begun openly to pay themselves as if they were the owners. Thus, at a time of falling real incomes throughout the West and ongoing battles against wage increases from fear of renewed inflation, the senior management has been doubling and tripling its take home pay. In Britain in 1988 alone, top managers received a 31.5 percent increase. And that was after adjustment for inflation. At the middle level in the same year, the increase was 4.7 percent. [11] In 1990, in Britain again, the old and solid Prudential Corporation lost £300 million in a single venture and was forced for the first time in half a century to cut its reversionary bonuses to pensioners by 8 percent. At the same time, its chief executive received a 43 percent wage increase -- £3000 additional per week. The equally respectable Norwich Union had an unprecedented loss of £148 million in the same year. This was matched by a 23 percent wage increase for the chief executive. At Rolls-Royce, the chairman, Lord Tombs, took a raise of 51 percent at a time when 34,000 of his workers were being threatened with dismissal unless they signed new contracts giving up their right to pay increases. 12 Company after company, throughout the West, is now paying its chief employee over a million dollars a year. Apparent income, involving perks, share schemes and management style, will multiply these sums several times. In other words, the manager has entered so deeply into his imaginary role as a capitalist that he mistakes his personal profit for that of his company and mistakes the shareholders' prosperity for his own.

***

For those who manage and do not own, there is nothing so disturbing as the sight of one who does. The company owner is a reminder of the manager's false pretences; a reminder that the latter has hijacked the occupation of the former, then deformed it to suit his own more comfortable needs.

The logic of the times has had something to do with what has happened to our economies, but the new elites -- industrial and governmental -- have also played a great role. They have created both market conditions and regulations which discourage private ownership and small businesses, while favouring the growth of large, anonymously owned companies. Those who do create companies find it difficult in the current atmosphere to grow beyond a certain size without ceding to the buy-out opportunities offered by the large corporations circling around them.

It isn't simply that the private ownership of larger companies has become structurally difficult. It has also become unfashionable. The hundreds of thousands of small businesses in which owners labour to make real money are looked upon by financial institutions, corporations and bureaucrats with superior bemusement. The world of big business is one of anonymity. The executive does not actually touch money. He exercises his profession. At that level, the owner finds himself isolated -- treated as a rather simple oddball whose corporate structures are not complex enough. His desire to control his means of production in such a personal manner throws doubt on the stability of his ego. The important modern capitalist does not stand out. He blends into the structure. He is not an individualist. This fashion is so hypnotizing that owners dream of becoming rich and successful enough to sell their company to a corporation and so, at last, to become a senior executive -- that is, an employee.

Vignerons in Burgundy have what comes close to being an ideal life Their work covers almost every area of expertise. They must be highly sophisticated farmers, talented chemists, company managers, public relations spokesmen and efficient salesmen. They work indoors and out. They are tied to both local traditions and international commerce. Few producers have more than thirty hectares -- that is, some sixty acres -- of vineyards. With that they are millionaires, richer than most corporate presidents. Some years will be wonderful and others disastrous, but the stock of aging wine in their cellars will give them financial stability. It is one of the most agreeable, varied and remunerative small businesses in the world. And yet, in family after family, the children, on inheriting, rent out their vineyards on long leases and go off to become corporate employees, teachers or civil servants. To be employed, even with a lower potential income, is to be respectable. To work for oneself is looked down upon.

There lie two of the central characteristics of the modern capitalist. He wants to belong. He talks a great deal about his individualism, but nothing frightens him more than independent action. He is profoundly conformist. Second, he flees responsibility the way European aristocrats once fled their estates for the royal courts, as if it were beneath their dignity to actually run something.

***

This flight from responsibility is also a flight from imagination. Imagination is at the heart of practical competition -- that is, seeking to create both better products and new products. Attempting to sell the unknown is an area laden with risks. It is also one of the principal arguments used in favour of capitalism -- that the buyer may choose and do so from the widest array of goods.

There is no denying that our economic system does try to produce the maximum quantity of goods. But it is not interested in exploiting the variety of tastes which exist in the population. Nor is it particularly interested in the quality of goods. The main desire of management is to minimize both risk and long-term investment. Central to this is a fervent belief in economies of scale. If the foibles of varying tastes were humoured, corporations would have to develop more and therefore smaller product lines. Instead they create blunt- edged products which can be aimed down the centre line of established taste, thus flooding the marketplace with enormous quantities of almost identical goods which are pitted against each other in areas of relatively established demand.

The battle of the marketplace cannot turn, then, on the public's comparison of products. Instead, it revolves around invisible organization strategies and visible packaging and publicity. This battle of quantity without variety can be seen in any sector, from high technology to basic manufacturing; from VCR systems, computers and cars to the simple selling of socks.

A visit to any sports store in Europe, North America or Australasia will produce the impression that dozens of distinctly different socks are on sale. A difference in price will indicate variation in quality. Packaging and labels will tell us that these socks are for tennis while those are for jogging. The colours and shapes of the packages will tell us that the contents are exciting. Images will suggest that the wearer already has or soon will have muscles. The labels will remind us of worldwide advertising linked to the fastest man or the richest champion.

But inside the packages, everyone will be selling one of two basic models. One will be short and destined for tennis, jogging and so on. The other will be long and destined for downhill or cross-country skiing and .other winter sports. The weave of all the short socks will be virtually the same. The artificial content will be either 100 percent or approximately 30 percent. The long socks will have the same percent. ages but a heavier weave. The short socks will usually be white, perhaps with stripes around the top. There will be some colour choice in the long socks, perhaps because snow sports call for a contrast. Only in the odd, museumlike shops here or there, behind a modest facade, can proof be found that variety and quality exist. Without a hint of packaging, dozens of distinctly different sports socks -- weaves, materials, colours, lengths -- will appear. Interestingly enough, a price comparison with the mass-production shop will show that quality and originality are often cheaper than mass production. Economies of scale are somehow not necessarily economic when they hit the store counter. Is this because of the costs of packaging and of supporting a corporate structure, with its managers who do not actually contribute a great deal to the production of socks? Or is it a phenomenon of competition in a sphere artificially closed by the demands of mass production and mass distribution -- what they used to call an oligopoly?

Socks are a simple example of how the marketplace offers greater and greater quantities of increasingly similar products. The electronics industry follows exactly the same pattern without a hint of embarrassment, perhaps because its products are the inventions of this era. In its case, the packaging will be the products' actual casing. In this way modern capitalism has inverted the purpose of practical competition. The drive to create different products which compete, thanks to various qualities, for the public's attention, has been replaced by the drive to differentiate virtually identical products in the public's eye through a competition between appearances.
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Re: VOLTAIRE'S BASTARDS -- THE DICTATORSHIP OF REASON IN THE

Postby admin » Thu Jul 02, 2015 9:51 pm

PART 2 OF 2

In this atmosphere of homogenized quantity, integrated structure and glorified senior-level employees, it is only natural that smaller companies suffer. But the principal drive against them has come from within the management of the large corporations. Their own lack or interest in long-term investment, risk or, indeed, products is what pushes the managers to seek organizational ways of creating growth.

The most obvious solution is to buy the product-making capabilities of others. These mergers and acquisitions simulate growth by devouring someone else's creativity. And since large umbrella structures seem inevitably to smother, rather than kindle, originality in an acquired company, there is a continual need to acquire more and more. As with Dracula, there is never enough blood.

The current "free-market" mythology tells us that those are the breaks. Capitalism is tough. The weak die. The strong survive. The highest bidder wins and, anyway, small units are no longer profitable. What we are witnessing, according to our managerial capitalists, is a healthy weeding of our overgrown garden, a rationalization of the Western economy. Unfortunately, this hyperbole bears no relationship to what is actually happening.

The large corporations have in reality become the equivalent of deposit banks. They are perceived as centres of measurable value in troubled times, rather as gold once was. They own property and have such things as production capabilities, trained employees and established markets. This solidity attracts not only shareholder support but also that of governments. It is a support which comes regardless of efficiency and profits.

Among the tens of thousands of corporate bankruptcies since 1973, very few have involved large structures. It is the smaller, risk-oriented companies which have been going under. They had no layers of protective fat and so a decade of high interest rates destroyed them. Those who held their lifeline -- the banks -- did them few favours.

High interest rates did contribute to a temporary and superficial slowing of inflation, but they also changed the capitalist terrain so drastically as to make a normal economic recovery almost impossible. First, the message sent out via the .inflation figures was totally inaccurate. Only a narrow slice of visible costs is measured in our tracking systems. The various consumer price indexes and other measuring devices do not cover what is really happening. Indeed, in many ways real inflation is higher now than it was in the seventies. As a result the balance created by monetarist' policy is so artificial that the moment growth does increase, so does the measured inflation. Immediately, back up go the interest rates and down go growth and job creation. Using high interest rates to strangle narrowly defined inflation now resembles bleeding a patient to reduce his fever. It does temporarily do just that. But the patient's problem is not the fever. It is a serious infection which is producing the sweat and the high temperature. In ignorance of that, the doctor keeps on opening veins until the patient dies.

The effect of our anti-inflationary policies over the last two decades has been that while the smaller, lean and aggressive companies have been going bankrupt, the large, fat, lazy, directionless corporations have been getting through all right. The banks have lent them money at favoured rates. They themselves have been printing money on the public exchanges. And the governments continue to treat them as parapublic bodies. One can hardly blame the politicians, who are terrified by the idea of large corporations closing. The arrival of large groups on the unemployment market is a demonstrable sign of failure in economic management. What's more, when the managers lobby governments, they arrive as important contributors to the party in power. They also talk the same language as the civil servants whom they wish to influence.

And so it has all been a neat and tidy operation coordinated by managers in different private and public sectors. Capitalist creativity has been discouraged and financial manipulation encouraged. This starvation campaign has left the fat slightly thinner, having converted some of their flesh into cash. Now they are beefing themselves back up by picking over the carcasses of the young and lean. In 1984 alone, $140 billion were spent in the United States on mergers, acquisitions and leveraged buyouts. By 1988 this was almost $300 billion, with 3,310 companies involved, In the United Kingdom some £150 million a year was spent on corporate acquisitions before the crisis of 1973. This figure then rose steadily to £5 billion and has now jumped to £15 billion. The inevitable passing of the leveraged buyout as it first appeared does not represent a change in the situation, but rather the passing of a particular tool for speculation. For example, worldwide merger- acquisition transactions had risen to $375.9 billion in 1988, involving 5,634 deals. Then came. the collapse in the speculative market. And yet the figures in 1989 were only marginally down, to $374.3 billion involving 5,222 deals. [13]

The public perception is that most of this activity is the work of speculators like T. Boone Pickens and the Junk Bond Kings. Not at all. The speculators are merely reflections of the managers. It was the management of big business which brought on the growth of the speculators. in the first place. They were like blind pigs gorging themselves as they wandered aimlessly over the countryside. It was easy pickings. Popular imagery has the loyal management attempting to fight off the greedy speculators. Of course, in some cases this is true; but in most cases they fight because they fear their jobs are at stake. In general, however, management has stopped lobbying for controls on the speculators because they have joined forces with them.

What could be better, one wonders, than managers buying out their shareholders? They are at last becoming real capitalists. Owners of the means of production. Owner-managers. But that is not what is happening. Their ownership is based entirely on a debt load which is out of all proportion to the company's equity -- often five to ten times equity. They have replaced a responsibly based ownership of shareholders with the sort of debt-based ownership which brought about the Great Depression. It is a world in which the managers of one large company take runs at the managers of another, usually somewhat smaller company. According to abstract theory, it is all a fair game. In fact, what the managers are doing is damaging the corporation which they now own by loading it up with debt in order to finance their takeover of it. The more productive the company, the more often it will be worth taking over. Many companies have been acquired twice in a decade, some three times. And each time the purchaser's. costs are rolled yet again into the accounts of the purchased.

American corporate debt is now some $2.2 trillion. It has almost doubled in five years. Interest payments on this amount absorb 32 percent of America's total corporate cash flow. This figure does not include the $1.1 trillion of outstanding debt in the' private financial sector -- that is to say, the capital sums raised by financial institutions, mainly through corporate bonds and short-term corporate paper for their own use. Nor does it include the $1.17 trillion outstanding in the noncorporate sectors, most of which are in the service industries. In other words, a great deal more than 32 percent of corporate cash flow is absorbed by interest payments.

And yet business leaders have been mounting continual attacks on the government debt load, which absorbs only 15 percent of the annual tax receipts. In Britain the corporate sector spends some 11.5 percent of its income on interest payments. The government spends 10 percent.

Little of this corporate spending is investment in corporate production capabilities. It is simply the printing and spinning of paper money. In 1984, the same year that $140 billion was spent in the United States on mergers, acquisitions and leveraged buyouts, $78 billion worth of equity actually disappeared from the corporate world. [14]

The motive which drives the large corporations on to devour the small has nothing to do with capitalism. Their public relations departments will come up with self-congratulatory phrases, such as that of Philip Morris when it took over Kraft for $13.5 billion: "We believe the combination of Philip Morris and Kraft will create a U.S.-based food company that will compete more effectively in world food markets." [15] The reality is that these enormous financial deals are not related in any way to the use and development of the means of production. They are related to a general management structure in which ever- more-abstract financial methods give the impression of growth. The problem is not simply one of specific probusiness governments serving specific business interests. It is more a logical outcome of the management methods which have been developing for a century. As in other sectors, a perfectly rational system is far more easily abused by the dishonest than used by the honest. In this specific case, by allowing the uncontrolled development of financial manipulation, the authorities have released, for the first time since 1933, the full forces of irresponsible speculation.

The confirmation that this frenetic activity is illusory can be seen in the real growth statistics of Western economies. They have been shrinking since the 1960s and, during this last decade of deregulation, have continued to shrink. The simple truth is that the production of a tractor is the result of men who know about tractors actually producing them and then selling them to men who actually use them. Financial planning and management methods are, at best, marginal facilitators. The essential skills of capitalism are concrete. The rest, as they used to say, is fancy talk.

A part of that fancy talk has involved arguing that mergers would create diversification and diversification would provide stability in tough times. It would also widen the circle of experience within a single organization. The reality has been that the experience is not used. Instead management feels obliged to design ever larger structures which can deal with all this variety in a homogenized manner. Everything must fit in, and on paper it does. As a result the central managers know less and less about what the company actually does, while those with concrete experience and concrete responsibilities are squeezed into corporate models which have nothing to do with their production. Those who don't know, institutionalize their power; those who do know, live in fear of losing budgets and jobs.

Senior management and their doctrinal advisers in the business schools have noticed, unavoidably, that these methods are not working. Their response has been threefold. First, to shut down production in areas in which they cannot "compete." As pointed out, this involves turning whole production areas over to Third World countries, Second, to move into those Third World countries in order to take advantage of local social and employment standards -- that is, to undermine the Western social consensus by relying on early industrial societies. Third, to reverse the process of the last twenty years by splitting their corporations into semiautonomous operations or by selling off chosen sectors, These semiautonomous operations give the managers all the tools of independence except the essential ones. As for the selling off of complete sectors, it simply brings most of those units full circle -- that is, back to being smaller, specialized, independent companies. In the process, however, they have been saddled with two burdens of debt, each in the amount of the company's value. The first was imposed by the takeover company at the time of the original purchase, The second was imposed on the managers by that same owner who now wished to be bought out.

Finally, there is the fourth solution, which is to attempt to bring the magical production methods of the East to the West. The East in this case means Japan and it must be said for the Japanese option that it is at least constructive. It also has the exotic charm which always disarms adults when they express a desire to learn. Of course, in the 1960s and early 1970s the same Japanophiles now proposing the Eastern option were teaching their students, or declaring through business organizations, that the Japanese had not gone through a proper industrial revolution and instead had arbitrarily stuck industrial production methods on top of a medieval paternalistic social system. This was socially impossible. Therefore it would inevitably produce a revolution and then the whole edifice would come tumbling down.

Today Western economists and business philosophers call this piggybacking, of the industrial on top of the medieval, the Japanese Miracle. The religious image is suitable. It coincides with their own conversion on the road to stagnation. These are the voices of big solutions and so now they talk endlessly of production teams and worker participation and company loyalty. Why a Western white- or blue-collar worker should be interested in loyalty, participation and teamwork is not clear when the units they work for are disposed of by management or speculators with an indifference reminiscent of the slave trade. And if they are loyal and their teamwork does lead to success in the marketplace, their unit will probably be loaded down as fast as possible with debt in order to finance some other unrelated managerial manoeuvre.

There are indeed many ways to manufacture and sell an identical object and there have been endless discussions about participatory capitalism, right here in the West, going all the way back to 1799 when Robert Owen, a highly successful owner of cotton-spinning mills, bought the New Lanark mills in Scotland and organized a model community based on the principles of mutual cooperation. His work strengthened the cooperative movement which spread in many separate directions, for example, to Bismarckian Germany and much later to Gaullian France. According to the Swedish historian, Hakan Berggren, it also went by another route, via the Manchester school of liberalism, to inspire the Swedish idea of social democracy. There is, therefore, no need to look to Japan, which has indeed found a solution half medieval, half postindustrial and quite particular to their society.

What our thinkers miss is that the West's problem is not one of production methods. Of course, these problems do loom in the factories. Factories are concrete operations where problems cannot be disguised. But the problem itself is largely in the management structure and in the management. If they wish to look to the East, they should note that Japanese companies are scarcely organized at the top. In their system, most of our management would be out of a job for the simple reason that they are irrelevant to the research, creation and production of goods.

***

Doing away with themselves and their systems is not among the options being considered by management. Nevertheless, the refusal of the means of production to respond to abstract systems does present a problem. One of the solutions management has found is simply to decide that, as economies evolve towards higher levels of technique and education, so they will evolve away from production and into the heavenly spheres of service. The future of civilized man, therefore, lies in the service industries.

Before entertaining an idea so warm and attractive, it is worth opening a contemporary dictionary; for example, Oxford:

Service: from the Latin servitium (slavery). The condition, status or occupation of a servant.


Beneath the word service and belonging to the same word family are serviceable, servient, servile, servility, servitude.

The philosopher of management would reply yes, precisely. In the future, civilized man, buying his less-sophisticated, messy goods -- such as steel -- from less-developed societies, will have at his beck and call the service industries of his own country. But the professor has confused his modifier. The primary servitude of a service industry is not to the public but to -real industry; that is to say, to the industries which increasingly produce goods under the political controls of "lesser" civilizations.

What is this servitude? Quite simply, service industries only have a market as long as real industry continues to supply basic goods at an acceptable price and in a market where the public can afford to buy them. Those three criteria must be satisfied before the public can turn, with whatever remains in its pocket, to purchase service industry goods.

The present disorder in Korea shows just how delicate such a servitude can be. It also reminds us that such a relationship assumes our acceptance of and financial support for the social systems in that country. Even Akio Morita, the founder of Sony and thus the man who had led the way in humiliating Western managers, rejects the view that service industries are the wave of the future for developed economies. He believes that economic growth requires a flourishing industrial base that can produce real added value. [16]

Closing the dictionary and opening any history of civilizations, the curious reader might consider the characteristics of societies in decay. At the meeting point between their rise and their decline, societies -- or rather the elites of societies -- always discover that it is beneath their dignity to continue to do the concrete things which caused their rise. And so they set about organizing their lives in a manner diametrically opposed to that which created their civilization and therefore justified its existence. However, they invariably retain the original supporting vocabulary and mythology of their rise, as if these talismans will protect them.

In embracing the world of service industries. we abandon the foundations of a middle-class society devoted to the work ethic and driven by a flawed, often hypocritical. but nevertheless real belief in some sort of human equality. As if the name Karl Marx had never been heard, we throw ourselves into demonstrating the core of his analysis. While the substructure of a society is rotting away, the superstructure continues to prosper, living off the decay below. But when the substructure is finally gone, it is only a matter of time before the glorious surface crashes down under its own weight.

Businessmen and economists argue that it was essential to turn towards service industries because these were areas of new growth. Had they continued to concentrate on the traditional areas, then manpower savings through modernization would have created a permanent unemployment crisis. This is not entirely false. But then, neither is the portrait of our society, as one faced by an urgent choice over the direction to take, entirely true. Nor is the description of the service industries as the natural creators of new employment based on anything more than abstract logic.

The most interesting of the service areas -- the high-technology industries -- are the least labour-intensive sector in the economy. Seventy percent of the manufacturing costs of a semiconductor microchip is knowledge- that is, research, development and testing. Twelve percent is labour. In the case of prescription drugs, 15 percent is labour and 50 percent knowledge. What's more, these technologies are using less and less raw materials. Twenty- five to fifty kilos of fiberglass cable can transmit as many telephone messages as one ton of copper wire. And those fifty kilos of fiberglass cables require only 5 percent of the energy needed to produce one ton of copper wire. [17] There is nothing wrong with these savings. To the contrary, they suggest that we might be nearing the end of the terrifying multiplications of industrial activity whose effect on the earth is just beginning to show. The point is that the serious service industries are not going to be massive creators of solid employment. Indeed, they should not be put in the service category at all.

Inevitably though, the high-technology industries are invoked whenever the service sector is being worshipped. The suggestion is that computers, software and advanced communications are typical of our service-based future. The reality is that they belong to the manufacturing process" where they are essential in such areas as research, development, design, production and sales. As Akio Morita points out, these elements cannot be separated out to be kept in the developed world, while manufacturing is moved to the Third World.

Why, then, have Japanese corporations apparently gone the same way as those of the West by building factories in such places as Mexico and Thailand? The answer is that their overseas production is not the result of a decision to divide the industrial tasks. Japan consciously maintains a complete domestic structure. Foreign factories primarily reflect the success of their international sales drive. They may benefit from lower production costs abroad, but if domestic employment began to suffer, it is probable that overseas production would be cut back. The point is that the Japanese do not accept our revisionist idealizing of the tertiary sector.

The original idea of service industries included anyone who did not manufacture a product -- that is to say, a capital good. Thus teaching and communications fell into the category. Many of these professions are now called public services, but if they form or help people, they are indeed making an indirect but essential contribution to production. In any case, it isn't these basic public service areas which are in expansion. Governments everywhere are trying to cut them back.

There are also services which are not considered industries because our obsession with profits seems to eliminate them from what we call the economy. In general these fall into the categories of charity and culture. As Maurice Strong puts it -- "Most of the valid needs as yet unsatisfied are of a non-material nature." [18] Why anyone believes that these services ought to be in a volunteer structure is not terribly clear. Is getting meals to old people who live in isolation less important than making golf balls? Everyone will answer no. Why, then, treat the former as after-the-fact voluntary work and the latter as an essential industry? The answer is that our managerial elites have adopted the Andrew Carnegie conviction that "great inequalities between men are essential to competition and to capitalism."

The main category of service industries, in which most job creation takes place, is that which creates and satisfies artificial needs. This consumer industry explosion has generally been described. as the inevitable product of a successful, rich and comfortable society, which already had all it needed. The next step was to create things it didn't need and to create actual services whose very attraction was that they were not necessary. These services and service objects, divorced as they are from utility, were free to grow, multiply, and build upon each other, creating their own self-contained justifications for existence. They could seize upon the minutest detail of clothing, hair, skin, sound, sight, housing, sport, food, transport, and build it up into a baroque cathedral of elements, style, complexity and apparent need.

There would be nothing particularly wrong with this if Western civilization, particularly that of the modem era, had self-indulgence as its goal. A glance at our history indicates the opposite. A glance at our contemporary situation indicates that while the area of greatest economic expansion is in the services of self-indulgence, growing percentages of the population are slipping back into pre-twentieth-century poverty.

And there lies the real paradox of modem capitalism. It is masterful at producing services people don't need and in large part probably don't want. It is brilliant at convincing people that they do need and want them. But it has difficulty turning itself to the production of those services which people really do need. Not only that, it often spends an enormous amount of time and effort convincing people that those services are either unrealistic, marginal or counterproductive. Never have our skills of organization been so developed, never have our desires for the accumulation of objects and comforts been so realizable. and never have events seemed so difficult to control. In other words, a rational economic structure finds it very difficult to give people what they really want because real human demand does not follow a fixed pattern. Giving people what they want is inefficient because it is irrational. On the other hand, it is efficient to give people what they do not want, because an artificial sales structure can ensure some rational buying patterns.

***

It is as if we are becoming what we originally set out to destroy. The elites of societies at such a highly evolved stage have invariably gathered into their hands sufficient real power to be able to betray the intrinsic line of their own society. They may utterly betray it while singing the sweetest lullaby to the contrary. While singing their hearts out for capitalism, competition and hard-won success. they may devote themselves to the employee's life. well paid and self-indulgent. The texture of our reigning mythologies is so thick that no one can see what is actually happening behind this intellectual and emotional camouflage.

Elites take criticism very badly. They immediately respond that the critic is on the side of the enemy -- the Left, the foreign rival, the forces of Communism or any other handy ideology. But do the elites, with all their competence and power, actually believe that societies-can be destroyed by anyone except those who lead them? The farmers. the factory workers; the ordinary civil servants. the lower- or even middle-level employees simply do not have the power to destroy or even to alter a society's direction. It is the elites who lead the way and the history of past civilizations is that the elites, at a certain point. cease to fulfill their obligations and begin to indulge themselves. The Roman farmer- soldier-citizens began importing wheat and hiring barbarians to fight for them. The European aristocrats abandoned their land and regiments and went to court. where they became well-dressed hangers-on and manipulators. And now our owner-producers are leaving ownership and factories and are becoming the hangers-on of urban comfort and excitement.

The modern manager is indeed an urban phenomenon. Preferably the city in question is New York, London, Paris, Toronto, Frankfurt, Milan. There he finds concrete daily proof of his own value by simply observing himself within the urban corporate structure. His hands are dean. He meets only people like himself. The industrial worker is a distant image, as dirty as the farm worker was in the memory of a noble landowner at the court of Louis XV.

The manager has no need to know such people or to go where they are. Often he has himself arrived from there. which heightens his desire not to go back. His Gucci shoes are proof that he has not just arrived from Essen or Baie-Comeau. What's more, he is also the prime believer in the advertising and the unnecessary services generated by his class. He buys the clothes. the cars, the makeup. the holidays, the sports equipment. the property. the pools, the tennis club memberships. Even armaments are built by the industrial managers for the consumption of the governmental managers.

Needless to say, none of these people want to live in Pittsburgh, Hamilton, Leeds, Lille or anywhere except in the handful of great urban heavens. This drainage of the "undesirable" parts of nations has created enormous social and economic shifts. The only countershift has come from the managerial need to be served by a weekend haven, as well as by summer and winter holiday installations. Thus whole sections of the West are given over to pure consumption during short periods of time -- Friday night to Sunday night or July and August, for example. The rest of the year they are virtually idle.

One of capitalism's greatest problems is that factories are less and less to be found in large urban centres. These companies cannot be well run by remote control: And the managerial class does not want to live where the factories can be found. Of course, some managers will live in these places, even good managers. But the pool from which they must be plucked is a birdbath compared to the ever-swelling sea of the urban managerial class. And if this class will not live in these places, then they are places which will continue to be drained of their activities. The conformism of our business elites is such that they will only go where they can find quantities of their own kind.

England has suffered more than any other country from this rush of talent towards a single city. The immediate and distant descendants of the men who actually made England -- the Midlands industrial middle classes -- are jammed into central London, trying to be merchant bankers, advertising executives and head-office managers.

The Midlands cities suffer from many things, but beneath their problems of equipment, labour and markets lies the simple fact that those who can afford to go to London do. There they devote themselves to being gentlemen -- a word, like so many in this century, which implies one thing and means another. In this case it involves an education, accent and manner of dressing which suggests some sort of long-established social standing. In reality it means membership in the new managerial class, particularly devoted to service industries which pretend to produce but don't.

***

After fifteen years of general economic crisis and depression in the West, the business classes are larger and richer than they have ever been. The standards of living of the population as a whole have been declining, while that of the managerial class has continued to rise. There is a shrinking of the middle class in the United States, but that represents precisely the ejection of those in the old middle class who have not managed to convert to the newer, managerial-class model. Looking at the fate of the owners and managers of free enterprise over the last hundred years, it would be difficult to argue that they have suffered in the social democratic state. In fact, it would be impossible.

And yet it is worth thinking about the development over the last hundred years of social legislation, work codes, financial market standards, emission codes and taxation policies. Is there a single example in any Western country of business in general reacting positively to the creation of fairer standards? And, when what are called "probusiness" governments have come to power and proceeded to lower the legislated standards of corporate behaviour, is there a single example of business in general feeling that these standards have been lowered far enough? Is there a single example of management feeling that independent public comment on the way businesses conduct their business is fair? A single example of forestry replanting obligations being low enough? Of social security payments being low enough? Of allowable industrial emissions into the air or the water being high enough? Of workers' rights of any kind being restricted enough?

All this could be interpreted as the normal give-and-take of free societies. But societies do not grow and flower simply on the basis of guerrilla warfare. The idea contained in the concept of a "society," especially in a "democratic" or a "free society," is that the participants are in general agreement and are willing to cooperate. The business community, and in particular the managerial class today, seems to see itself as a privileged partner who may withhold cooperation at its sole discretion.

The labour movement often takes the same sort of attitude. But unions are just a creation of the business community. They are an exact reflection of the corporate mentality. If they are selfish, it is a selfishness proportionate to their employer's. A union can only react to situations it finds. So when someone like Arthur Scargill, head of the British miners' union, creates such disorder that it is clear he has quite another agenda than the settling of specific grievances, it may be true that he is out of control and dangerous. It is also true that he is the creation of long-term unsatisfactory attitudes among mine owners and managers. That he appears when that may no longer be the case merely demonstrates that history works slowly and that reflections may appear after the original mirror has been broken. Quite simply, the union leaders have learned a great deal from the management's noncooperative approach towards society.

There is a worrying self-satisfaction about the idea that capitalism is always the enemy of fairness. Is it true that the business classes have always stood united against reform and social cooperation? Clearly not, since the reform parties throughout the West were financed and sometimes led by members. of those classes. Not only the British Liberal Party in its glory, but the Labour Party after it, was supported by men from the great Midlands industrial families. So were the Democratic Party by the American equivalent, the French Radicals and even Socialists, the Canadian Liberals and so on.

Today few members of the business classes work within the reform parties, Fewer and fewer, in fact. These men appear to have moved increasingly to the sort of social refusal you would expect from a nineteenth-century robber baron. Their opposition to fair social standards is virulent. You have but to question them on visiting day at their child's private school or as they come out of their large houses with two or three cars in the drive.

Each will tell you in an excited manner about the destruction of initiative and the pulling down of free enterprise. No matter how pro-business the government in place, he will talk about Left-wing government policies. He will seem to have no inner vision of himself as a high-salaried and well-protected tenant of a business bureaucracy. Instead he has dressed himself up in his mind to play the role of Andrew Carnegie, the great capitalist, just the way Carnegie must have played himself. As the scene ends, he leaves you behind on his lawn and drives away in the company's Mercedes to his salaried penthouse corner office in heaven.

The question recurs: what makes him act this way? He himself doesn't seem to know. He has been handed the carcass of capitalist mythology and been left to do something with it. Rather than admit to himself the limitations of his own power, it is only natural that he should choose to dress himself up in the full regalia of the rampant capitalist. The real owner of real production facilities is the one far more likely today to be interested in social consensus. Without it, he has a great deal to lose.

The technocrat's refusal to be a cooperative partner in the establishment of public morality suits his temperament perfectly. He likes to create the context and set the rules before he agrees to play. In society this is impossible. The relationships are too complicated. He therefore switches into his natural mold, which is defensive, and uses his detached cleverness to manoeuvre his way through convention and law, cutting as close to the letter of permitted action as possible. The contemporary cliche has it that the Nietzschian Hero is a rebel against systems. But here it can be seen just how like Siamese twins the Hero- technocrat relationship is." Morality is the herd instinct in the individual," Nietzsche wrote. [19] The Hero shows his amoral individualism by setting his personal moral agenda and imposing it. The corporate executive, being but an employee, demonstrates the same amoral individualism by defining the greatest good as the ability to manipulate systems.

When a fraud involving £215 million was discovered in the U.K. corporation ISC Technologies, the chairman of the parent company, Sir Derek Alun-Jones, stated that the problem hadn't been picked up at first because £105 million of the total had been siphoned off through offshore companies, "Transactions with Panamanian, Liberian and Cayman Island companies are quite usual in business." [20] In other words, the company was quite used to the idea that the government and the citizenry could legally be denied corporate taxes through offshore mechanisms, Subsequently, certain managers had found a parallel way to remove money from the company, The difference was that the corporate cheat was legal. Moreover, this sort of legal cheat was so widespread as a way of doing business that it had become "quite usual." The illegal cheat was a rare, one-time affair.

It is this cleverness which a whole new generation of owners and managers, especially from' the exploding service industries, has discovered and accepted as the norm for business attitudes, Their own service industries being so artificial, they have been able to grasp this cleverness and manipulate it into a means for making considerable amounts of money. There is very little distinction between avoiding the letter of the law and evading the law altogether. When a clever man is operating in the heat of the action, there is no difference at all.

***

Those on the Left, whose opposition to Capitalism is ritualistic, of course protested this sort of activity. Unfortunately, the battles they fight generally have little to do with the events taking place. At the 1978 World Socialist Congress, a resolution was passed which began:

The Socialist International is fully aware of the growing importance of Multinational Corporations within the world economic order and of the urgent need to control the activities of these organizations.... Such controls can only be effective if better information systems on Multinationals are developed. [21]


But all the information was and is available. If anything, we know too much. In their desire to see the multinational as a premeditating monster, they were missing the very essence of the animal -- that it has no particular direction or desires. It is moved only by the needs of its organization and by the narrow ambitions of its managers. The multinational is like a centipede, which moves across borders with the ease of a structured blob.

Because of this the employee of the multinational can be seen as the perfect international citizen. The adjective anational would probably be more appropriate. Already some economists are describing him as the harbinger of a future world in which all artificial barriers to the movement and commerce of man will have been swept away, taking with them the narrow, destructive selfishness of the nation-state. Who better to lead the way than the international manager, who has no ax to grind and just wants to do business?

The idea certainly has its attractions. However, the malleability of the multinational executive has its origins not in open-mindedness but in indifference. He is perfectly willing to agree with local politics if they agree with him. Equally, the moment they no longer suit his purposes, he feels free to subvert them. The power of his corporation will no doubt have permitted it to forge an important place in the local economy, often by buying up or smothering smaller national or regional competitors. To his own corporation's opposition to local policies the manager may well be able to add that of his company's friends -- fellow multinationals, banks, international credit organizations and even other governments, particularly that of its home country. The issue at hand may be anything -- taxation levels, pollution controls, employment standards, reinvestment policies, R&D obligations.

In annoying a multinational subsidiary, the local government will be creating for itself enemies that stretch far beyond the policy in question. And if that government holds firm, the manager and his corporate subsidiary may simply walk away to some other local situation which suits them better. What's more, the subsidiary may have created such local socio-economic tension that other multinationals will follow. They will leave behind an economic void which may contribute to the eventual fall of the recalcitrant government.

The manager and the organization to which he belongs are perfectly disinterested players. In their hands the idea of the public weal withers away. Social unity in any size community is based, after all, on the ability to accept not getting what you want. A desire to free man from the narrow-based interests of nationalism is no doubt a good thing, but freedom is also an agreement on how to share responsibilities. The nation-state is just one of man's many attempts to deal with that idea. Now organizations such as the EEC are attempting to widen the definition by establishing common standards among groups of nations. The multinational, with its anational managers; is an attempt to escape any responsibility, thus retaining the power to treat each community according to the corporation's interests.

And yet the multinational is not quite so indifferent as it pretends to be. Even a centipede has a general program in life. Even the most intricate system must satisfy itself. And the core of that system is in head office. It is the interests of the head-office managers which decide the general flow of investment and of capital. When head office is in New York, most of the board members will be American, as will most of the senior managers. They may buy and sell internationally, but they wake up on East Seventy-sixth Street; Their primary concerns are those which surround them. Their first political thoughts are for the country in which the corporation is based.

This will not stop them from playing off the policies of a nation in which they have a subsidiary against those of their own country. Their use of cheap Third World labour to force down Western standards is a typical example.

The end result, however, is not to give power to the subsidiary. Even when called upon by headquarters to appear threatening, the subsidiary is the passive element in an international structure. In the old colonial manner, local elites are hired to ensure local cooperation. The local authorities can but see themselves as the passive receivers of investments and jobs. You can always tell, from the form that economic discussions take, whether you are in a place which is at the centre of multinational structures or at the end of an extended loop. The further you are from the centre, the closer to the beginning of the discussion the word jobs will appear. Jobs are the passive element in industrial activity. They are received as the result of a process which begins elsewhere with such things as capital investment, R&D, industrial planning and markets.

The idea of Capitalism as a venture within society or between societies based upon cooperation and mutual profit is thus absent from the multinational model, and increasingly it is absent from the smaller managed corporations. Precisely that cooperation has made Japan's success possible. All the Japanese particular peculiarities, which we are now attempting to imitate, are merely consequences of that cooperation. That is why our efforts to imitate them resemble parody more than they do reorganization. You cannot have a Friedmanite view of market forces or a business school idea of business as structure and then expect to benefit from the cooperative methods proper to the Japanese or to the Swedes or even to the Koreans, to take three very different examples. The market approach and the cooperative approach are mutually destructive.

***

A few years ago, a full-page Gulf Oil advertisement appeared in many newspapers:

PROFIT IS NOT A FOUR LETTER WORD. IT DOESN'T REPRESENT ILL- GOTTEN GAINS. PROFIT ISN'T THE RESULT OF RIPPING OFF THE CONSUMER. PROFIT IS WHAT A COMPANY WORKS WITH. IT'S THE MONEY WE USE TO FIND OR DEVELOP ENERGY.


Following the 1973 crisis, Western governments had desperately sought a way to deal with the economic catastrophe created by their dependence op OPEC oil. They finally decided to leave the corporate part of the price increase in the hands of the Western-based multinational companies responsible for transporting energy. These corporations could then reinvest their new riches at home or in stable countries outside OPEC, with the aim of discovering and developing a guaranteed energy supply for the West. Their reward for acting as good citizens was that they would make a big profit out of the reinvestment.

This was a leap of faith on the part of the citizenry and of their governments. They would have been perfectly justified in taxing away these massive windfall profits, which were bringing the Western economy to a halt. What is more, the lead-up to the crisis had been filled with events which indicated that the oil companies ought not to be trusted with the public interest.

For example, only months before the crisis, the Canadian oil companies (largely American owned) had told the government that national reserves were enough to last a century. They said this because they wanted permission to export across the border to the more profitable American market what reserves they actually did have. When the crisis came the declared national reserves turned out to be imaginary and Canada found itself a prisoner of both foreign supplies and the priorities of foreign oil companies. The managers had simply lied behind a screen of misleading statistics. It was not that they had been forced to choose between the interests of their shareholders and those of the citizens in their country of operation. Rather, they had chosen freely to make additional profits for their shareholders, which required endangering the fundamental well-being of the citizenry.

A second example affected the United States itself. In 1972 the companies agreed that some $4.50 a barrel would be enough to ensure adequate exploration and production for the domestic market. [22] That is to say, $4.50 would pay for exploration and ensure a healthy profit. A few months later, the crisis struck and OPEC raised the price, not to cover new costs but to increase profits. Abruptly the American companies discovered that they had underestimated the costs of exploration inside the United States. Instead of $4.50 a barrel, they could squeeze by with $10. Then it was $15. Then $20. In the case of each price increase, the justifying technical arguments were so watertight that no reference was made to the very recent cost-related lower price.

Some people assumed that the companies were making up for the hard struggles of earlier years by claiming their just reward. But most of these multinationals had been around for half a century. The days of risk were far behind them. They functioned more as oil banks, buying up the discoveries of the wildcatters, who risked their shirts on a daily basis. Between 1968 and 1972, the seven major U.S. oil companies had already accumulated net profits of $44 billion. In the same period, they had paid less than $2 billion in federal tax; an effective rate of 5 percent. When the crisis struck, they were already rich beyond the dreams of most corporations.

The Western governments decided, nevertheless, to entrust the companies with the gigantic new profits. In the first year of the crisis, their worldwide earnings increased 71 percent. Their net profits were $6.7 billion. They had paid $642 million in taxes. Texaco, for example, earned $1.3 billion after taxes. Exxon, $2.4 billion. [23] At this point, Western economies were plunging into the abyss.

The companies immediately began reinvesting their profits. But not in oil. Mobil bought Montgomery Ward, the department store chain -- net worth $8.5 billion -- and in the same period took out full-page ads:

WHY ARE YOU SO SUSPICIOUS OF LARGE CORPORATIONS?


Sun Oil bought the Stop-N-Go grocery chain. Shell went into plastics; Exxon into copper mining, while mounting a reassuring ad campaign:

YOU DON'T HAVE TO FEAR US. PART OF THE PROBLEM OF THE LIBERALS' D1SLIKE APPEARS TO BE SNOBBERY PURE AND SIMPLE.


As the money rolling into their pockets further crippled the West, the corporations were able to buy companies at depressed prices. Insurance companies. Medical supply companies. Gulf tried to buy Ringling Brothers Barnum & Bailey Circus. Others discovered box manufacturing, timberland, general forest products, more department store chains. By the early 1980s, they had 25 percent of the listed resource chemical companies (copper, lead, zinc, silver, gold).

They had also taken over a majority of the largest American coal companies. Their first management initiative in this sector was to cut back production in order to get coal prices up. This was done in a nation already desperate for energy. By the end of the 1970s, they had fourteen of the twenty large coal reserves, two of the three top uranium producers, and three of the four large uranium reserves. [24]

Atlantic Richfield had a more concentrated strategy than the others. They bought up surface coal-mining reserves throughout the Midwest until they were the largest player. And then, without rushing to develop these resources, they began lobbying Washington to switch American energy dependence from oil to coal. Their argument was that domestic coal reserves were sufficient to provide long-term stability. They also argued that the market price for this coal would have to be the world price equivalent of an OPEC barrel of oil. They knew that surface coal is almost as cheap to mine as sand on a beach. So did everyone else in the energy sector. The potential profits were therefore unimaginable, even by oil crisis standards. The reason Atlantic Richfield was so eagerly lobbying Washington, instead of just going ahead and using its capitalist skills to mine and sell coal, had to do with physical infrastructure. There wasn't one for the distributing or burning of coal. What America needed in order to embrace the Atlantic Richfield strategy was coal pipelines and new coal-burning plants. Any innocent who had been listening to the free-market rhetoric of the oil companies would have imagined that Atlantic Richfield had already formed a syndicate with other coal-producing companies, so that they could all borrow against their future gigantic earnings in order to finance arid construct this infrastructure. But that idea wasn't even entertained. Instead the entire infrastructure was to be built at public expense.

As for the windfall profits which the industry in general was receiving thanks to the oil price rise, some of them were indeed being reinvested in 'new energy development -- not nearly enough, however, to eliminate the West's dependence on foreign oil. And so, like babes in the woods, governments and their citizens slipped towards the next oil crisis, which shook them more than the first.

These legal but dishonest actions by the oil companies are considered to be among the great exploits of modern capitalism. Their complex ruses were admired by other business sectors and raved over by stockbrokers and merchant bankers. At first glance it would seem that such an attitude was in direct contradiction of the principles of reason. After all, in the original Encyclopedie, Diderot began the entry on the "Morality of Richness": "The means for enriching oneself may be criminally immoral, although permitted by the law." [25]

Of all the integrated energy corporations involved, only one or two were owned or controlled by an individual or by an identifiable group of individuals. The mass of unnamed shareholders at no time pushed their companies to so betray the public trust and damage the fabric of the state. Like most stock market investors, they were in the passive position of watching their money grow or shrink. It was growing and so they were glad. They did not really consider the implications of that growth on their own society. The entire direct responsibility for carrying out what may have been the most irresponsible private economic act of the century lies with the managerial class, who are the flower of methodology and the children of reason.
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Re: VOLTAIRE'S BASTARDS -- THE DICTATORSHIP OF REASON IN THE

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PART 1 OF 2

17. The Miracle of the Loaves

Inflation has always meant flatulence. The seventeenth century expanded the meaning of the word, beyond the blowing up with and expelling of gas, to include such attitudinal derivatives as bombast and pomposity. It was only in the 1860s that inflation focused itself on economic phenomena.

This was not brought on by a revolution in the world of finance. Money has always been like a gas, which alternately rose and fell, poisoned and induced Rowers, was opaque and then clear, sweet-smelling, then noxious. With hindsight, the nineteenth-century clarification that uncontrolled money was nothing more than uncontrolled farting therefore made perfect sense. From that moment on it became almost impossible to confuse inflation with growth.

And yet, that is precisely what businessmen, economists and bankers have insisted upon doing over the last thirty years. Just as our structures and elites prefer corporate manipulation to real production, so financial manipulation comes more naturally to them than the creation of new capital. The result has been the gradual conversion of our economies into myriad new forms of inflation, most of which are not measured by our many measuring institutes. Much of current economic argument turns upon levels of measured inflation which reflect the small potatoes of national economies. They do not reflect what is really happening. And so to all appearances, we do not inflate. Instead, behind an insistent discourse about sophisticated populations, postindustrial economies, postentrepreneurial corporations and service industries, we create offshore funds and uncontrollable offshore currencies, such as the Eurodollar, which grow according to their own logic. We run virtually uncontrolled money markets within our own borders. We permit highly leveraged buyouts. We allow takeovers to be financed by the privately initiated printing of money against the value of the target company's assets. We create false capital through the providing of imaginary ser vices, particularly that of selling arms. We allow the uncontrolled printing of money through such devices as credit cards. We allow banks to service their bad debts through the issuing of new shares, thus permitting the public exchanges to be used not to increase capital through debt, but to cover disintegrating capital through more debt.

The list of monetary devices is endless. Most economists would protest that while these activities mayor may not add to the atmosphere which creates inflation, they are not in themselves inflation. They think that if you want to know what is happening to the economy, you can limit yourself to the consumer price index or the GNP price index or other highly specific indexes.

But if these are sufficient, then why can we no longer have growth without an immediate explosion in measured inflation? The answer is that we are not experiencing real growth. And why do we have increasing prosperity at one end of society with increasing poverty at the other? Because the creation of wealth is now dependent on financial manipulation by a small percentage of the population and not on production by an integrated society. And why are we constantly being told that a fall in general standards of public service and/or standards of living is now essential to economic well-being? Because financial manipulation creates profits but adds nothing real to the economic wealth of the society. These abstract methods are so widespread and sophisticated that, as in the 1980s, they can create the impression of general prosperity when the reality is one of continued decay in both economic and social infrastructures. Our elites seem often to be the most perplexed by the inability of their systems to create real wealth. But, then, they are themselves the product of the rational system and not its creators. They therefore live in the profound expectation that their methods will work. Their isolation from reality is such that they believe their systems can produce growth where in the past only inflation has grown.

***

"We are money-makers, not thing-makers," Jim Slater, English merchant banker and the father of modern inflation, declared two decades ago, not long before he crashed, bringing down banks and corporations with him. Along with others like Sir Arnold Weinstock and Lord Stokes, he had declared himself to be a. force of modernization and efficiency, a claim which had been accepted as truth by the British financial establishment. [1]

Slater had been trained as a company accountant. He had a natural talent for stock market manipulation. In 1964 he created Slater, Walker Securities and set about buying companies priced below the value of their property and parts, carving them up and selling off everything concrete until only a shell remained. He and his imitators had soon destroyed hundreds of integrated engineering and production corporations because these could easily be sold off for cash. And cash could then be played with. They were engaged in the dismantling of the British economy for personal profit and pleasure through inflationary financial manipulation. Slater claimed that he was releasing productive elements caught up in hidebound conglomerates. In fact, studies of industrial reorganization in that period show that there was no benefit to the "released" companies. Slater, Walker rose to fame in part by continual lending or investing of its own money in one or another of its own companies, thus manipulating their share values. Jim Slater -- young, slim and engaging - was soon considered to be "the greatest financial wizard the City had ever known." [2] In 1969 he began to sell off his assets -- to deconglomeratize. He announced that cash was the "optimum investment" and turned his attention to areas more directly related to cash -- property speculation, financial management and investments in Hong Kong. This cash religion encouraged other banks to overextend themselves, pumped up property speculation and drove corporations to a point where 27.5 percent of their net cash flow was going out in interest payments. And yet that terrible figure was still 5 percent lower than the 32 percent currently being paid out by American corporations to cover their debts.

Nevertheless, it was an unheard-of level for the times and, when the first crash came in 1973, the unconventional inflation of the British economy meant that it was harder hit than most. Even Jim Slater's wizardry couldn't maintain the illusion of his own empire. He chopped and changed through 1974 and 1975, only to be left with almost valueless remains. His operations were subject to a multitude of investigations, all of which could easily have been carried out years before when he was apparently successful. In late 1975 he was forced out of his own company, a discredited man, and the pieces were picked up by another market player, Jimmy Goldsmith.

Some time passed before the British and other Western governments realized that they were failing to escape from their generalized state of depression. The habitual correctional devices weren't working. Their reaction to this failure resembled that of a manic depressive. That is, they began a long crusade against classic inflation; driving up interest rates and thus killing real investment; driving up unemployment and thus putting a strain on social services. This crusade went on and on. We are still on it. Somehow, no matter how Draconian the measures taken, we never manage to cut off the inflationary fat, clearing the way for healthy, noninflationary growth.

In absolute contradiction to this depressive anti-inflationary crusade, we went on a parallel. manic financial binge. Consciously or unconsciously, we began to lift restrictions and to lower standards throughout the financial sector, thus freeing the profound forces of inflation. Of course, no one was permitted to play directly with the traditional governmental inflationary control tool -- money supply. This and the area of wage and price increases were roped off, so to speak, and kept under obsessional public scrutiny. Social justice, economic growth, the fear of nuclear war and various other themes retreated into the background as the West hovered over the monthly, weekly, sometimes daily, movements of inflationary charts. A tenth of a percentage movement up or down could cause a generalized shudder. Public life seemed to have been reduced to statistics. Elections were fought over fractions.

Meanwhile, every other potentially inflationary area was gradually being opened to marketplace manipulation. General economic activity was drawn towards the financial sector by this explosion in ever-less-regulated activities. Inventiveness concentrated itself n the creation of new, immeasurable financial abstractions -- abstractions built upon abstractions -- forms and levels of leverage which made the standards of 1929 seem almost responsible by comparison.

By the mid-1980s -- even before the Big Bang -- the annual value of transactions in the London financial market was $75 trillion a year. That is more than twenty-five times. the total value of world trade, which was $2.84 trillion in 1988. Foreign exchange speculation in major world centres was $35 trillion a year -- twelve times the total value of world trade. These transactions represent no concrete activity. They are multiplications of paper which have no beneficial effect on economic activity. Thus, the City in London may prosper and cohabit quite happily with general economic depression in the rest of Britain. The degree to which governments have become addicted to the easy pleasures of this speculation could be seen in Britain's reluctance to put the pound into the European Snake, and indeed into the European Monetary System, both of which are attempts to develop monetary stability in a large but realistically manageable geographic area. [3] The official British argument against participation has been that the Snake might limit the government's ability to set policies appropriate for competition at home and in the world. One of the unspoken reasons was that membership in the Snake might eventually limit the City's ability to speculate in currencies. The gradual conversion of the City to the Snake came as they realized that speculation would not be limited.

In this context the traditional definitions of bank exposure no longer mean very much. Writing in 1873, Walter Bagehot said of reserves: "The amount of that cash is so exceedingly small that a bystander almost trembles when he compares its minuteness with the immensity of the credit which rests upon it." [4] Bagehot's minuteness would seem enormous today. For example, in the mid-1980s, the American merchant bank Lehman Brothers had a capital base of $270 million. It had a daily exposure of $10 billion.

This floating speculation in bonds and securities is done by numbers men on computers. Convention calls them bankers, but they are merely technicians, whose training resembles that of a clerk and whose talents parallel that of a racetrack bookie. They have no experience away from their screens; no understanding of the industrial activity the illuminated numbers represent. Worse still, they have neither responsibility for nor a sense of the effect that their enormous transactions might have on society as a whole. As early as 1984 men such as this were trading $4.1 trillion in a single New York merchant bank, First Boston Corporation. That was more than the total American GNP.

The golden word which has permitted all of this is deregulation. The United States followed by the entire West, has raised this flag in the name of the spirit of initiative. There is no doubt that a half century of administrative structure building -- aimed at repairing the injustice, instability and damages created by nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century free markets -- had gone too far in certain areas. But the reaction to this overregulation has borne no relationship to the real problem at hand. The result has been the return of antisocial freedom: the freedom to act irresponsibly, to speculate and profiteer, not just over stocks but over money itself.

The problem does not lie only with specific fashions, which may be short-lived, from currency swaps, junk bonds, financial futures and options to stock index futures (which require a down payment of only 6 percent), leveraged buyouts and over-the-counter equities, whose real value is unclear and thus open to speculation and arbitrage. Nor are these fashions as short-lived as they sometimes appear. In an economy so distanced from reality, forms of speculation no longer disappear simply because they have been exposed as of dubious value. For example, junk bonds have gone on after their disasters of the late 1980s and now represent more than a quarter of all corporate bonds rated by Moody's. Nor are these dangerous phenomena limited to the United States. Japanese regulations permit leverage based on 5 percent. British corporate debt has risen from £10 billion just before the first crash in 1973 to £53 billion billion in 1988. One might suspect that this was a creation of the inflation-infected 1970s. But official inflation seemed neither to encourage nor to discourage corporate debt. Things got even further out of control during the 1980s. The whole process was fed by minor finance companies, which under stricter regulations would be considered marginal, if not criminal. With deregulation they became banks. And the large deposit banks, seeing the enormous paper profits made by these little speculators, leaped down into the gutter to play the same game. The overall picture is what Keynes would have called a Casino society. [5]

And that is now one of the determining activities of our economies. The truth is that annual growth in the U.S. economy after inflation has steadily shrunk as deregulation has proceeded: 4.2 percent during the 1960s, 3.1 percent during the crisis-ridden 1970s, and 2.1 percent during the theoretically prosperous 1980s. In Canada, despite its wide and solid social protection net, the number of people living in poverty grew in this period of deregulation from 14.7 percent in 1981 to 17.3 percent by 1985 and continues to grow. [6]

On Wall Street, on April 24, 1987, a rock band appeared on the floor of the American Stock Exchange to excite brokers with its music. The Hard Rock Cafe restaurant franchise was going public. The appearance of that band on the trading floor symbolized the service- industry mind, the, role of hype in a deregulated marketplace and the idiotic joy which always appears in moments of economic anarchy.

What is consistently fascinating at such moments is the self-contained, self-absorption which comes over first traders, then businessmen, then the public and their government. Everyone starts to believe that what is happening is real. Speculation is transformed by a wand into investment and investment is safe. But most incredible of all is the abrupt illumination that money is something, when everyone knows perfectly well that it is just a notion, not even an abstraction, because we are unable to agree permanently what it is an abstraction of.

The best we have done is to find workable arrangements. This seems to work most successfully and for the longest period of time when there is some conservative relationship between real labour/resources/products and the quantity of money available. Within those limits a reasonable Keynesian and a reasonable monetarist are not very far apart. But people have difficulty remaining reasonable over, abstractions. Instead they get so used to their arbitrary definition of the abstraction of money that they decide it is both real and absolute.

Our particular difficulties rise out of reason's natural preference for abstraction over reality. The result is quite revolutionary. We have formalized speculation into a rational system. And yet, if there is one lesson hi history, it is that inflation and depression follow on the heels of an economy which gives itself over to speculation, particularly speculation on debt.

Contemporary monetarism, despite its narrow obsession with money supply and classic inflation, has produced the greatest debt levels of modern history, accompanied by onerous or impossible burdens of interest. Odder still, while the monetarists remain obsessed with the state's indebtedness, they are indifferent to unprecedented corporate and personal debt levels. In fact, the corporations are more strapped than governments by their interest payments. Interest, whether paid by governments or companies, is a basic form of inflation; but governments retain other mechanisms, such as law and regulation, for encouraging economic activity. While the British government is myopically paying out its debt, the British citizenry, for the first time in history, is spending more than it receives. Its debt load has doubled over the last six years. In the absence of real growth, corporations and individuals can only hope to repay these debts through continued inflation. Or they can default. The level of both corporate and personal bankruptcies continues to grow throughout the West, reaching historic levels each year. Now, in the early 1990s, it is three to four times higher than it was in the early seventies.

The Third World debt load is part of this same process. Rarely has there been a financial obligation more evocative of the inflationary spiral built by level upon level of debt. The process of its creation is worth repeating. The United States pushed the oil states -- principally Iran -- towards unnecessary consumption, much of it military. Iran pushed OPEC for oil price increases in order to pay for its consumption. The West then printed money to pay for the oil. The oil states had to send that money back to the West to pay for goods, in large part service-industry goods, particularly arms, and to deposit it in a safe place. The Western banks then owed this money to the producers, principally the Iranians and the Arabs. And as it was on deposit, they also owed them interest. The Western economies being stagnant, because of the oil price rise and the resulting paper money inflation, the banks found it handy to lend part of their enormous new deposits out to the Third World. The theory was that so much cash. would speed development, thus creating a new market for unwanted Western goods. This didn't help the developing countries, however, because their economies had been paralysed by the same oil price increases, as well as by the decline in commodity prices caused by the collapse of Western economies. So the banks lent them more money to support the original loans. The more the West lent, the less the Third World could pay back. As it now stands, many of them cannot even service the debt without bankrupting themselves, causing civil disorder and destroying what little social stability they have.

Clearly the money is lost. However, our governments and banks have now spent a decade twisting and turning, forcing the debtors through stricter economic hoops than any Western country has imposed on itself. And when this produced no repayment, but instead exacerbated local poverty and suffering, our solution was to lend yet more money, thereby creating yet more unpayable debt. We then began forgiving a few hundred million here, writing down a few more there, rescheduling anything that seems on the verge of becoming what it actually is -- a bad debt. One international conference has followed another as we have attempted to maintain the illusion of viable loans. When James Brady, the American secretary of the treasury, proposed an integrated plan for dealing with the situation, there was a sigh of relief in sensible quarters and anger in much of the banking community. But the Brady plan didn't even go halfway towards dealing with the problem. It was a quarter step in muffled boots. The publicity surrounding these debt-restructuring plans is such that people tend to imagine the problem is now being dealt with. In fact, the Third World debt did not shrink and indeed continues to grow.

The fear rational structures have of recognizing reality, calling it reality in open, public terms and dealing with it as reality is so deep set that even steps in the right direction must be disguised as something else. Were any citizens to settle down and listen to what our economic spokesmen are actually saying about the Third World debt, they would be astonished. The only possible conclusion they could draw is that our structures and/or our elites are mythomaniacs. That is, they are compulsive mythologizers. But this need to describe reality other than as it is -- that is, to lie compulsively -- is merely a facet of the rational conviction that man can and will change circumstances to suit his own plan. The more abstract our economies, the easier it is to believe that imaginary financial situations can be endlessly manipulated. There is, however, nothing in history to prove that this is so.

***

During the sixth century B.C., the people of Athens fell slowly into troubled times. The City was dominated by the Eupatridae, the aristocracy of birth, who controlled the government, owned most of the land and used its power to drive the poorer fanners into debt during bad seasons. The Eupatridae acted as bankers. When the farmers were unable to meet the interest payments on their debts, they were reduced to the state of serfs on what had been their own land. Some were sold into slavery. A serf or a slave was, needless to say, no longer an Athenian citizen. This debt situation spun further and further out of control.

Faced by an impossible division between rich and poor, resulting in economic instability and the risk of revolution, the desperate Athenians called Solon into public office and gave him full powers. Twenty years earlier, he had already served as archon -- the annual chief ruler. He was also Athens's leading poet. He used his poetry to set examples and to create political drive. His message was constant: moderation and reform. He was as opposed to revolution as he was to tyranny. This sense of moderation is important to understand in light of what followed. Already the unpayable debts and the growing inequalities had pushed him to write:

Public evil enters the house of each man, the gates of his courtyard cannot keep it out, it leaps over the high wall, let him flee to a corner of his bed chamber, it will certainly find him out.


The atmosphere in which he took power was not so very different from the one we know today. The same manic-depressive mood layover the society, The Draconian financial/legal policies of the depressive rulers were based on Draco's original legal code. The manic counterweight revolved around the uncontrolled activities of the rich.

Solon's first act on taking power was to redeem all the forfeited land and to free all the enslaved citizens. This he did by fiat. That is to say, he legislated immediate default. The Athenians called it the "shaking off of burdens," but in practical terms what he had done amounted simply to ripping up the debt papers. In his own words, he had

uprooted
The mortgage stones that everywhere were planted
And freed the fields that were enslaved before.


Having released both the people and the nation from their paper chains, he was able to reestablish the social balance. From there he went on to create a code of fair laws (in place of Draco's) and to lay the foundation for a democratic constitution. Athens immediately began its rise to glory, spewing out ideas, theatre, sculpture and architecture, democratic concepts and concrete riches. All this eventually became the foundation of Roman and indeed of Western civilization. Today we cannot move a step without some conscious or unconscious tribute to the genius of Solon and of Athens -- a genius unleashed by defaulting on debts.

Henri IV was probably the greatest king of France. His road to the throne was long and expensive, Winding as it did through a civil war which raged across the country. When he was finally upon it in 1600, the country lay in ruins and the government in debt to the amount of 348 million livres -- a colossal sum for the time. Henri's chief minister was Sully, who to this day is considered one of the finest and most careful of public servants. He first refused to pay the interest on the debt. Then he negotiated the rates down from those originally agreed. He refused to meet the payment schedules. One way and another, he as good as defaulted. Within a decade he and Henri had rebuilt France.

In 1789 Jefferson wrote from Pads to James Madison about the principle of debt, applying common sense to reality. Today names such as Brazil or Peru could be substituted for that of eighteenth-century France.

Suppose that Louis the XIV and XV had contracted debts in the name of the French nation, to the amount of ten thousand milliards, and that the whole had been contracted in Holland. The interest of this sum would be live hundred milliards. which is the whole rent-roll or net proceeds of the territory of France. Must the present generation of men have retired from the territory in which nature produces them. and ceded it to the Dutch creditors? No, they have the same rights over the soil on which they were produced as the preceding generations had. They derive these rights not from them, but from nature. They then, and their soil are, by nature, clear of the debts of their predecessors. [7]


Throughout the nineteenth century. the loans which financed large American capital investment programs, mounted by private consortia, were continually defaulted on. The history of the American railroads is a history of default. More specifically, the history of American capitalism is one of default. This happened in a spectacular manner during the Panics of 1837, 1857, 1873, 1892-93 and 1907. None of this reneging happened in the civilized manner organized by a Solon or a Sully. Rather it involved a panic and a crash. which created massive bankruptcies. which in turn wiped out massive debts. Because of the disordered way in which each ripping up of obligations came, the result was always a short period of Widespread depression before the cleansed economy took off again with renewed force. In the Panic of 1892-93 alone, four thousand banks and fourteen thousand commercial enterprises collapsed. In other words. the nonpayment of its debts was central to the construction of the United States. The difference between Henri IV and the American railway crashes is one of method. not content. The great depressions of the last hundred and fifty years can be seen as the default mechanisms of middle-class societies. Depressions free the citizens by making the paper worthless. The method was and is awkward and painful, particularly for the poor. but it destroys the paper chains and permits a new equilibrium to be built out of the pain and disorder of collapse.

One of the most surprising innovations of the late twentieth century has been not only the rationalization of speculation but, beyond that, the attachment of moral value, with vaguely religious origins, to the repayment of debts. This probably has something to do with the insertion of God as an official supporter of capitalism and democracy. There is a tendency to assume that the German thinker Max Weber made sense of all that in the early years of the twentieth century with such books as The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Weber described the rise of capitalism as both an initiator and then a product of the Reformation. The result was the bourgeois businessman who, "as long as he remained within the bounds of formal correctness, as long as his moral conduct was spotless and the use to which he put his wealth was not objectionable, could follow his pecuniary interests as he would and feel that he was fulfilling his duty in doing so." But Weber also pointed out that the success of capitalism led to an abandonment of Christian values and became "the pursuit of wealth, stripped of its religious and ethical meaning." He described the resulting high capitalism as a mundane passion resembling sport. What's more, he specifically exempted the "usurers, military contractors, traders in offices, tax farmers, large merchants and financial magnates" [8] from his Protestant-capitalist theory.

The simple truth is that the collecting of interest on debts contradicts the entire history of Christian doctrine. It is not a matter of fair versus unfair interest rates, To lend money for profit was and remains a basic venal sin, In this sin of' usury it is the lender who is in the wrong, The borrower has weakened in a moment of need and the lender is exploiting his weakness, This theme has reappeared constantly throughout history to justify not only default but often the confiscation of the lender's goods and sometimes his life.

Christianity was by no means alone in its attachment of sin to lending. The moneylender was most definitely not on the fast Buddhist track to nirvana. Muslim lenders, at least in theory, were risking death. And it was clearly laid out in the Torah that Jews should not charge other Jews interest. [9]

European anti-Semitism was often rationalized by the immoral status of lending. But Jewish banking power was largely a self-fulfilling prophesy for Catholic states. In some cases Jews were forbidden any other occupation, By borrowing from individuals unprotected by the official racial or religious organization, it was all the easier for Christians to default. A little religious excitement would do the trick. Or a periodic pogrom. Or simply, in the case of kings, a refusal to pay, leaving the Jewish lender with no legal recourse. By organizing European society so that Christians could borrow from Jews, the Christians avoided contravening Catholic law. And the Jews, by lending to Christians, were not in contravention of their own religious laws. In other words, both sides were avoiding divine retribution by means of a technicality.

Of course, base anti-Semitism was attached to all this and it cannot be ignored. However, the list of unrepaid, jailed, exiled and hanged Catholic and Protestant lenders is so long that the default syndrome must also be looked at quite apart from religious and racial prejudice, The stark fact is that financiers have never had a respectable status in Western society; neither in its Christian nor its capitalist period. Bankers were never integrated as a class of worthy citizens along with burghers, merchants and capitalists. They were never considered to be making a contribution to the social fabric. Interest paid them was always believed to be money for nothing and therefore both immoral and inflationary in the most basic sense. They have always lived on the margins of the law and of society. From time to time individual bankers were swept up into the mainstream and won power and glory. But the moment they were no longer useful, they were flung back into the gutter.

Jacques Coeur, for example, rose through the tax-farm system in Bourges in central France early in the fifteenth century. Speculation made him still richer and he put himself in the service of King Charles VII. Gradually he combined his Europe-wide financial empire with official functions -- Minister of Finance, Royal Counselor, diplomatic negotiator. He financed the King's conquest of Normandy in 1450-51. Eventually the King and the great nobles were deeply in debt to him. He was conveniently charged with the murder of the King's mistress, Agnes Sorel and imprisoned although cleared. He managed to escape to Rome.

In 1716 a Scottish monetary theorist was given permission to tryout his paper money system in France. The government was heavily in debt and John Law's inflationary method promised to solve its problem. By 1718 he dominated the royal treasury and the financial-markets through a spiraling international speculation which was built upon the imaginary development of a colony in Louisiana. The frenzy reached its apogee early in 1720, then collapsed, forcing Law to flee. He died penniless in Venice.

Very little changed over the years. In 1893 Emile Zola published his novel Money, in which he illustrated the methods of the financial markets and the moral opprobrium which fell upon the bankers of the day. His central character was a banker-promoter, Monsieur Saccard, who specialized in running up stocks which were issued on the basis of theoretical developments elsewhere -- in this case, the Middle East. Because of the facility with which he makes money, he is the star of the financial world. As Zola points out: "what's the point in taking thirty years of your life to earn a miserable million francs, when in an hour, by a simple investment on the Exchange, you can put it in your pocket? ... You become disgusted by honest savings, you even lose all sense of value." [10] Although Saccard's promotion eventually collapses, ruining hundreds of people, he simply begins again.

People like Zola's banker-promoter were often very rich, but no one really wanted to know them or know too much about them. They were speculators, marginal, nonproductive but always tempting. Our contemporary investment bankers -- whom we celebrate as pillars of society and bastions of capitalism -- are Monsieur Saccard's successors.

The emergence of the banker and speculator at the top of our list of worthy citizens is perfectly rational. When a well-tailored, responsible-sounding vice president of a deposit bank makes an appearance, this general social promotion of money lenders seems to make sense because he is an executive employee, a technocrat and an expert. The reassuring sounds he makes cause the observer to forget the historic and indeed actual implications of treating him with such awe.

It is far easier for the citizen to focus sensibly on those bankers who are still kept on the margins of society. At the mention of the name T. Boone Pickens, for example, the citizen can easily say to himself, "Now this is a speculator." But this speculator is supported by the most respectable New York investment banks -- by precisely those well-tailored, responsible-sounding bankers who produce awe and respect wherever they go. And yet Pickens is, if anything, a more doubtful figure than the Monsieur Saccard of Zola's story. The respectable bankers are embarrassed by his crudeness and yet annoyed to find themselves mere followers in his financial games. The result is that they have taken up his methods while being careful to remain clothed in their own respectable appearance.

***
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Re: VOLTAIRE'S BASTARDS -- THE DICTATORSHIP OF REASON IN THE

Postby admin » Thu Jul 02, 2015 9:53 pm

PART 2 OF 2

The new respectability of bankers has added weight to the argument that paying debts is a moral obligation. And yet it is hard to forget that whenever a society has defaulted on a crippling debt, its economy has been the better for it -- sometimes so much so that, as in the Athenian or American case, the whole fabric of the society was catapulted into growth and creativity.

The Third World debt crisis is a prime example of economic common sense in conflict with structural morality. Since the early 1980s, people as varied as the former New Zealand Conservative Prime Minister Robert Muldoon and the British Socialist economist Lord Lever have been calling for what amounts to a general default on the debt. [11] Their point was that it would be far better' to do it fast and to clear away the paper chains than to go on constructing elaborate mazes of new paper, which have all the disadvantages of a default and none of the advantages. The new paper syndrome simply drains the energies of both the debtor and the lender countries for the sole purpose of protecting an illusion.

No doubt the deed would already be done if our general deposit banks had not attempted to hide their original error by throwing the money of their small and medium depositors after that of the artificial oil profits. Besides, the general rise of debt and deficits has created an unspoken fear -- that ripping up the Third World notes might destroy the sense of moral obligation other debtors feel towards other debts. The Third World's paper obligations are, after all, only the leading edge of a Western civilization dependent, as it has never been in the past, on debt manipulation rather than industrial production for economic survival. Right behind the nations of Africa and Asia are those of Central Europe, to say nothing of the Western governments themselves, the corporate world and even the individual citizens, all of them more or less chained up by their paper obligations.

In fact, the sum which is destroying Third World societies isn't really very significant by Western standards. At $1.2 trillion, the entire Third World debt is less than the annual U.S. government budget. The London financial markets, it is worth repeating, do $75 trillion worth of transactions per year. If the paper were ripped up today, without any agreement among the parties, the banks would have a bad year, but they wouldn't go bankrupt. In fact, the smarter banks have already written down some of the amounts they are owed.

One of the things which stops us from doing it, with or without agreement, is the peculiar morality that public and private structures have arbitrarily welded onto the act of debt repayment. Tawney, in Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, pointed out that however badly medieval man did behave, he did so in a context which insisted upon his duty to alleviate the poverty of others and in full knowledge that the accumulation of riches was endangering his soul. The rise of the work ethic out of the Reformation changed all this, equating poverty with laziness and wealth with the idea of just rewards for hard work. [12] What followed was the unprecedented mistreatment of a large segment of society by a small segment. This social disorder was itself followed by the slow reintegration of the morality of social responsibility into Western society -- that is, into the new nation-states. It was as if general common sense had extracted in extremis the best from the defunct medieval contract and then set about forcing it upon the new rational structures which were rapidly taking form.

Our current attitudes towards debt confirm that we have moved on to yet another stage. Now social morality is subordinated to the efficient functioning of the system. In this stage the social contract is subordinated to the financial contract. The idea of morality has been so deformed that it is used as a simile for the efficient functioning of systems and, therefore, as a simile for the respecting of contracted debts. The result is that we are unable to use our common sense to weigh the poverty and suffering created by the debt against the relatively limited impact on the system of a default.

And so, each time Mexico was considered unofficially bankrupt because of its inability to meet the interest payments on its debt, we felt obliged to offer a series of huge new loans. These were not designed to relaunch the Mexican economy. They were merely papers aimed at financing the Mexicans to pay the interest on the other papers which they already owed us. The advantage to Mexico was nil; to our banks, probably less than nil in the long term, because yet more unpayable debts were being created; to our society, certainly a lot less than nil, because it locked us further into a maze of artificial financial limits. And when a new Venezuelan government came to power in 1989 in an atmosphere of general hemispheric enthusiasm, the first Western act was to force an austerity program upon the President, with the intent of ensuring responsible debtor attitudes. When this program led to rioting and deaths, the reaction was twofold. First, American Secretary of the Treasury Brady proposed his quarter-step restructuring plan. The effect of this slow, negative process was to worsen the agony instead of resolving the problem: The Venezuelans themselves initiated a desperate conversion program. This involved giving ownership in parts of their national patrimony in return for cancelling the paper obligations. The program bears an eerie resemblance to Thomas Jefferson's "unnatural" scenario, in which insolvent debtor Frenchmen would have to abandon their country to lender Dutchmen.

Crises such as these are repeating themselves throughout the Third World. As the realization of the de facto default gradually sinks into the slow, slow minds of the financial and economist communities, a curious response emerges. The Third World, they say, should stop blaming the Western bankers for its problems. The real problem is the absence of capitalism in its countries. The real culprits are therefore governments of the Right and the Left that try to direct their national economies.

Of course, there is some truth in this. Throughout the Third World there is room for the releasing of responsible capitalism. But far more important are responsible agricultural programs which would encourage peasants to leave their hopeless urban slums and return to the land. In any case, responsible capitalism is not what most of the financiers and economists have in mind. Their imaginations are filled with the releasing of pent-up market forces. What they want is an industrial revolution which, like that of the West, must necessarily pass through the ugly, uncontrolled first period in which new industrial infrastructures are matched by social disruption and suffering -- in other words, low wages, no job security and no environmental or safety regulations. No one puts it quite that way, but this is assumed in the argument.

However, there is no relationship between the unleashing of capitalism and the unpayable debts. There was a relationship in their creation. The original debts were incurred in an attempt to industrialize the Third World through the unleashing of capital. The World Bank and Robert McNamara led the way, followed enthusiastically by the banking and economist communities. But the attempt failed and the debts then became the barrier to future economic activity, particularly capitalist activity. The debts came to represent the victory of rational paper illusions over real activity. The problem is not the refusal of governments to unleash capitalist forces. The problem is the impossibility of breathing life into these countries so long as the unpayable debts remain in place.

By confusing the continued smooth functioning of systems on the one hand with moral values on the other, our society loses its ability to examine and judge whether each structure has any useful value. The practical effect of our hypnotized state is to leave moneylenders in charge of the economic and social agenda. The Third World debt is only a slice of this problem. The way we look at inflation and corporate financing is determined by the same confusion. Even government debt could be looked at in a different way and perhaps dealt with in a different manner if the nature of debt and of interest payments were examined dispassionately. If the importance of debt is reduced to its use as an abstract enabling device, then paper inflation, interest and repayment can be handled in a practical manner.

***

The hypnotic effect this uncontrolled paper economy has had can be seen in the world of corporate acquisitions. From the farthest margins of legality, a new kind of acquisitor advanced onto the respectable public stage in the early eighties. These men could be seen as a second generation of Jim Slaters. But when you examine a T. Boone Pickens, an Ivan Boesky, a Paul Bilzerian or a Henry Kravis, you realize that, while their technical skills are more sophisticated than those of the original corporate raiders, their intentions and social standards are actually far cruder. They seem to have evolved backwards, resembling, if anything, characters out of Zola. Their equivalents exist throughout the West, all united by a belief that capitalism is a paper transaction. They could be called the new inflationists. That society has accepted them so naturally seems to confirm our decision to normalize speculation as the leading edge of capitalism. And there can be no doubt that we have accepted. As early as 1983, for example, Pickens's epic run at Gulf Oil was backed by America's largest bank holding company, CitiCorp. [13]

That attempted takeover was played out like a parable of modern economics. On one side there was Gulf, the fifth largest American oil company, widely considered by the business community to be the perfect manager's operation. However, its return on capital for the preceding five years had been the lowest of the fourteen major U.S. oil companies; its dividend growth the slowest. And it had a lamentable record when it came to discovering new American oil. The lethargy of the directionless, self-justifying, risk-fearing managers had finally become so great that they had stumbled into financial trouble and woken themselves up, so to speak, by falling over. As a result they actually began making some personnel changes in order to give the appearance of trying harder.

Given the wide shareholder base and the company's repeated failures, we are led by the theory of free enterprise to expect that a responsible segment of the owners would rise up and replace the entire management with a new team. Instead Pickens arrived on the scene, having bought 13.2 percent of the company's shares, thanks to various forms of leverage. He was not an alternative to bad management. He was in the ball-and-chain business. What attracted him was that poor management had caused the share values to slide to the point where they stood at $40 versus the estimated $114 value of the company's assets. Mr. Pickens made no secret of what he intended to do if successful in getting control. He would sell off the company's oil and gas reserves -- its only real assets -- for a cash profit. In other words, he would strip the company.

Of course, this intention was dressed up in technocratic verbiage, in order to imply the opposite. The reserves were to be spun off into a "royalty trust." This would siphon off the company's earnings directly to the shareholder. The little shareholder would thus benefit from his investment. With a logic which would have confused Ignatius Loyola himself, it was explained that this removal of potential reinvestment capital would have the effect of increasing investment.

The reality was quite different from these imaginative explanations. Pickens had created a situation in which he couldn't lose. Either he would force his way onto the board of directors and from there force the company to sell off its assets, giving him a cash profit. Or, having already driven up the share prices by making the market expect a selloff, he would force the management's friends to buy his 13.2 percent of the shares for roughly the same cash profit. In other words, either he destroyed the company or he further indebted it. In both cases, the money generated would be pure inflation.

What followed was a battle between a lethargic group of technocrats trying to save their jobs and a raider who wasn't interested in the industry or the company. His weapons were cash and the manipulation of the free enterprise system. The managers were armed with the full panoply of corporate and legal structures and regulations. The battle surged one way and then the other.

Just as Pickens appeared to be on the edge of victory, the Gulf management discovered a technicality capable of saving their day. If a majority of shareholders voted to move the company to Delaware, local laws would permit management to refuse Pickens a seat on the board. The struggle veered onto new ground -- a proxy battle leading up to this vote. Managers are always at an advantage in the manipulation of invisible voters, and they were able to scrape together a narrow majority. The company decamped to Delaware, though nothing actually moved. It was a paper operation.

In this battle between employed incompetence and irresponsible greed, there was no hint that the shareholders, the financial authorities, the large financial institutions or even the government had any sense that the free enterprise system was running off its rails. They all seemed to find the events quite normal. In fact, Pickens was backed by almost half the shareholders and by many of the most respectable financial institutions. His snatch-and-run technique was analyzed by all the public financial experts -- from the Wall Street Journal to the Financial Times -- as if it were a bonafide takeover attempt, rather than a simple stripping operation.

Only a few years before, these people had treated Pickens as a charlatan. What had changed their minds? Before Gulf, he had made a much-criticized snatch-and-run operation on the $4 billion oil company, Cities Service. This takeover bid had also "failed." However, the aim of the operation had been achieved -- he and his backers made a large profit. Because the mainstream definition of contemporary capitalism centres on the word profit, that made him respectable.

Pickens is only one among hundreds of old-style sharks to have been welcomed into the mainstream of the American marketplace. Paul Bilzerian, for example, worth some $40 million, made a dozen or so runs at banal companies going innocently about their business before he was arrested. Hammermill Paper or Cluett Peabody and Company would look up from their desks and shop floors, startled by an unusual sound. Suddenly, out of the night, a madman would come charging in, a great word over his head, the blade glinting with menace. Needless to say, they either fainted or paid up. Bilzerian didn't even bother to invent justifications, such as Pickens's insistence that he is standing up for the little shareholder." If I were writing an article about myself," Bilzerian once said, ''I'm not sure I'd write a positive story." [14]

Or consider the takeover of Beatrice, the consumer products giant. This unwieldy corporation was the creation of management men who had produced false growth through buyouts and diversification. In 1987 they, in turn, found themselves under attack from Kohlberg, Kravis, Roberts. Kravis used a tiny slice of equity -- $40 million -- to manipulate the purchase of Beatrice for $6.2 billion. [15] They then broke up the company and sold off pieces for about $3 billion. The whole process -- from the $40 million investment to the $3 billion wrecking profit -- took sixteen months. Not a penny of growth was involved. Kravis claimed that he had done the economy a service by taking production units away from administrators and selling them to doers. Of course, there is an element of truth in this; the kind of truth which is produced by logic out of control. One group of technocrats -- the management -- had created a monstrous conglomerate, fomenting their sort of inflation in the process. Then a second group of technocrats -- the takeover specialists -- had come along to break it up, thus fomenting another. The purchasers of the units sold off by Kravis are now labouring under a whole new and unnecessary burden of debt -- $6 billion worth.

This debt has been added to the American economy. It frees no one and involves no investment in new production. The Kravis argument is sophistry intended to cover the reality of a purchase based on valueless junk bonds and fast speculation. Quite apart from the buy-sell profit, the professional fees included $10 million to Drexel Burnham Lambert for junk bond financing; $45 million to Kohlberg, Kravis, Roberts for putting the deal together; $33 million to three banks -- Kidder Peabody, Lazard and Salomon -- for advice. None of these fees relates to economic activity. If our system allowed for prosecution on the basis of the spirit of the law or of the spirit of capitalism in a democracy, Henry Kravis would be a criminal. Instead his exploits are admired. This can only encourage others and make the producers of real goods feel that they are wasting their time.

***

Specific blame for this situation is laid by many people at the feet of men such as Donald Regan -- who converted so much of the American public interest into a broker's dream world of commissions, commissions, commissions. This assignment of responsibility has the advantage of placing the problem in a specific country under a specific government. It is then possible to talk of Reaganism and the uncontrolled and irresponsible eighties. The reality is that the problems were not proper to the United States. Western economies, one after another, went down the same road. None of the highly educated elites - business management, government management or economists in general- rose in protest. As a matter of fact, those experts provided the rational structure and the vocabulary which gave the whole profiteering approach a socially acceptable appearance.

No doubt the result was not exactly as they had imagined it. Perhaps that is why the authorities, along with the general public, were reassured in a childlike way by the revelation that some of these transactions had actually been illegal. The Boesky revelations followed by those on Michael Milken brought forth a collective thrill. In Britain there was a heave of self-righteousness over the Guinness case. The President of the French Republic went on television to muse about the nature of money and joined in the theoretical public soul-searching over the insider trading of his friend Monsieur Pelat.

Abruptly there was a general feeling that things had changed; that a new more responsible era had begun with the new decade. But what was this feeling based upon, apart from wishful thinking and the easy pleasures of a few high-profile fraud cases? There has been virtually no reform of the laws and regulations relating to financial transactions. A great part of what is technically legal in the marketplace remains economically irresponsible. At 25 percent of all corporate bonds rated by Moodys, the junk bond is very much an economic tool of the nineties. When one of the most exciting and profitable new international financial markets is consecrated to swapping Third World debt among banks, it is clear that the investment houses have not rediscovered the virtues of financing new production. Kravis has left the bad publicity of the greedy eighties behind him and now offers a whole new approach to recycling his highly leveraged assets.

An ever-growing number of American banks are either going bankrupt or being artificially maintained in existence by the federal emergency bank insurance system, which is itself effectively bankrupt. Meanwhile, major new financial scandals appear at brief intervals. A series of linked stockbroker insolvency scandals erupted in Milan in 1991. Revelations of wrongdoing at the major American investment bank, Salomon Brothers, brought on legal charges and a major corporate shakeup. Warren Buffett, the "clean" financier brought in to repair the damage immediately volunteered that the temptations and the rules remain as they were in the American system. And the people who "attempt to behave badly ... seem to be getting away with it." The British Serious Fraud Office began an international investigation of the large leisure company, Brent Walker. Among other problems, one billion pounds had mysteriously disappeared from their accounts in a matter of a few months. The result was 18 months of financial crisis followed by a major restructuring which involved 18 corporations. A series of Swedish finance companies collapsed in 199, culminating with Gamlestaden. Weak regulations resulting in poorly secured loans were pinpointed by a government study.

The ex-New York mayoral candidate, Rudolph Giuliani, in his days as a U.S. attorney, instigated many of the fraud prosecutions of the late eighties. He believes that the financial community has "the ability to self-correct." [16] This implies that those under prosecution have deviated from general standards. That is incorrect. They are in the mainstream. The worst you could say about them is that they are swimming just ahead of the corporate average. In Britain Lord Roskill's Committee Report on Fraud Trails began as follows: "The public no longer believes that the legal system in England and Wales is capable of bringing the perpetrators of serious frauds expeditiously and effectively to book.... The public is right." [17]

In New York, the quantity of insider-trading violations has leapt up since deregulation. Even before Boesky, the SEC had brought seventy seven enforcement actions between 1982 and 1985. That is the same quantity as between 1934 and 198I. It is not that men are more dishonest. It isn't simply that deregulation has returned us to the atmosphere of pre-1929, although it has. These are both results, not causes. As Robert Lekachman. then professor of economics at the City University of New York, said, "The market is no more crooked than ever, but it's still less honest than Monte Carlo, because there at least you know how much the house takes." [18] In a study of young men caught in the Boesky scandal, Carol Asher round them to be from middle-class backgrounds, with average BA's but a subsequent degree from one of the best business or law schools. They had above- average salaries and were on the promotion track, Their colleagues described them as "motivated," "bright," "conscientious," "determined," "intense," "eager," "entrepreneurial" and "very hard working." [19]

In other words, they neither needed to break the law nor were apparent lawbreaking types. They were simply part of an overall economic atmosphere in which the definition of smart had nothing to do with social standards, because society had canonized structure and the manipulation of it. They were like most people on Wall Street or in the City or the Bourse. Perhaps they had gone one step too far, even by the generally accepted standards.

The product of this atmosphere has been a general concern about the decline in ethics. Business schools have rushed to create courses on ethical behaviour. [20] But when the economic system has been abstracted from reality, there is nothing concrete upon which ethics can be judged. The result is a wild inflation in the definition of integrity. These flatulent ethics mirror our monetary inflation. An ethical decision taken under current business structures has no more reality than a real estate transaction in a Monopoly game.

***

Beyond these national and multinational manipulations of money and ethics, there is a whole parallel world which is entirely free from the need to manipulate because it isn't subject to any rules or standards. This twilight zone of finance -- offshore, tax free, unregulated -- is so imaginary that it could be considered pure inflation. Arid yet. the elements with which this zone plays are drawn from the real economies of nations.

The world of offshore funds, for example, takes us directly into the adventures of Zola's financier, Monsieur Saccard, selling the shares of his imaginary Middle East development on the Paris Bourse. and of the great English crash known as the South Sea' Bubble, The South Sea Company was rounded in 1711 with the idea of trading in slaves in Spanish America. In 1720, despite mediocre growth, the company proposed assuming the British national debt. Parliament accepted and the company's shares soared from 128 to 1,000 and then collapsed. Apart from all the people ruined, a subsequent investigation revealed massive public corruption. It was the same year as John Law's fiasco in Paris.

Somehow the imposition of physical distance -- of borders and of seas -- between the investor and the investment has always given the investor a childlike confidence in his own judgment. Knowing that he cannot know what is really involved seems to make him more optimistic. Australian and Canadian mining stocks were sending shivers of almost erotic delight through the comfortable classes of Europe, such as the English gentry and the Parisian medical profession, as long ago as the mid-nineteenth century. With some spare time and some spare cash these same people still love to search desperately through their atlases for obscure settlements where gold or oil strikes have theoretically been made, while the shares run up and up. Before its spectacular bankruptcy, Dome Petroleum's mysterious Arctic strikes were the stuff of dreams in European country houses. [21]

But this distant wish fulfillment has taken on a whole new abstract charm in the late twentieth century. Offshore funds and the Eurodollar market, just to name two, are previously undiscovered universes. Even an atlas cannot tell you in which country these operations take place; nor a planetarium upon which sphere. They reside solely in the human imagination.

The Quantum Fund, managed by George Soros, is a good example of this new-universe imagination. Soros has even written a book on his methods called The Alchemy of Finance. There is no more inflationary idea than the turning of base metal into gold. This he has apparently done with his Fund valued in the billions of dollars. It is based in the Caribbean tax haven of Curacao, thus escaping most Western disclosure requirements. He is among the most successful offshore money managers and revels in secrecy as he leaps from stocks to commodities to currency, and from country to country. One year gold is to be made in Finland, then perhaps in bananas, then in deutsche marks, then through the desperate middle European governments. The trick to his success seems to be the speed at which he moves and the essential customer confidence in his skills. They must have confidence because they cannot verify his actions. But is it confidence in his ability to choose investments, finance them with a complex undisclosed system of debt and realize profits in an unexplained manner? Or is it confidence in a dream which is the essence of inflationary riches?

Stocks and commodities have been wonderful sources of offshore manipulation, but nothing has been as exciting as currency speculation. During the last fifteen years of floating rates, all of our private financial institutions, plus the "entrepreneurial" money men, like Soros, have been able to devote themselves to playing the numbers. The competing interests of various nations have permitted the currency market speculators to play one economy off against another, thus running the currencies up and down, while leaping nimbly back and forth to make a profit on both sides. Soros fondly remembers making "the killing of a lifetime" in 1985 by getting himself on the right side of the dollar's decline. His Fund made a 122 percent return that year.

Finance ministers, who are meant to devote their time and energy to creating a solid financial base for national administration and growth, are instead forced to spend a good part of their lives outthinking the currency speculators. It is difficult for them to keep a step ahead because the speculators' abstract approach has nothing to do with capitalism, growth or investment. In fact, it doesn't have much to do with any economic factor. Currency speculation is the closest thing to a child's game that a grown man can play for a living. It is also the hardest activity for a single government to stop. And so the game of numerical abstractions goes on, unsettling incomes, production and stability. In the seventeenth century, Soros would have been hanged. Today, he is profiled in the International Herald Tribune and lauded for his talents. [22]

***

So many kinds of inflation have now been invented that we do not have the. tools to measure them. We are still far from even admitting to ourselves that they are inflation. Instead we stick stubbornly to our classic measurements based upon narrow lists of concrete terms. But why should the measurement of inflation be based upon the sort of items which our society now says are marginal in such a sophisticated world? If we have turned our main drive towards the service industries, of which financial services are a part, then the nature of inflation has changed and we must examine what we really think it is.

For example, the credit card is a private means for printing currency which escapes any central bank control of the money supply. In the second half of the eighties, German credit cards multiplied approximately five times to some five million. From 1976 to 1988, the number of Visas and MasterCards in Britain went from 6.4 million to 24.5 million. For the single year 1987-88, British credit card spending grew 26 percent to some £8 billion. In France, there were 17.7 million cards by the end of 1988. In 1988 spending literally doubled in twelve months to 458 billion francs. The result of this evolution has been a massive growth in personal debt throughout the West. During the 1980s credit card spending multiplied seven times in Canada. In 1988 alone Canadian credit card debt grew from 10 to 12 billion dollars. [23]

Even in areas theoretically measured for inflation, the figures are deceptively low because they are not designed to reflect service economies. The increase in property costs, for example, will probably reflect only sales of new construction or rent increases in specific areas. Thus the 2 to 5 percent inflation figures which Western countries have been announcing do not include a full measurement of the tripling of most urban housing costs over the last ten years. [24]

Most consumer price index food lists are based on an assemblage of staples which hardly represent what people actually eat. The price of these staples moves far slower than the majority of foods, partly because they are staples and are not a growth area in consumption; and partly because the cost of staples is often indirectly controlled by general government programs, precisely because these areas do involve staples. Dairy, grain and egg production are typical of this phenomenon. Or again, barometers such as the. GOP deflator measure the price of output produced entirely inside }he country. They don't deal with imports. Even the illicit drug trade must be seen as an integral part of this swirling inflation. Estimates put it at some $300 billion a year. Enough, the Japanese deputy Finance Minister says, to "undermine the credibility of the financial system." [25] What, then, is one to think of the equally artificial arms market, three times larger than the drug market, with the added advantage of being both legal and secret? It appears nowhere in our monthly or annual inflation figures.

And what about the very straightforward question of interest rates? We seem to feel that levels are now higher than necessary, although tolerable when compared to those of the late 1970s. But current rates are actually very high when seen in the context of successful earlier economies. From 300 B.C. to A.D. 100, the Greeks charged between 6 and 9 percent. The Romans ranged from 6 to 8 percent between 500 B.C. and A.D. 100. As the Empire went into decline, the rates rose to 12 percent and after A.D. 300, went up still further. In the eighteenth century, British rates were around 6 percent; French 2 to 6 percent. In the nineteenth century, a period of strong growth, British rates were 4 to 5 percent; French, 3 to 6 percent; German, 4 percent; and American, 6 to 8 percent. And throughout most of the twentieth century, until 1973, rates were around 3 to 6 percent. [26]

For twenty years we have sometimes been below 10 percent, but more often above it. In general our rates for preferred customers are double historical averages. And the ability to print private money through credit cards has created a parallel interest rate which has been running between 15 and 22 percent. Third World loans and junk bonds almost all run at these levels. Common sense tells us that interest has nothing to do with real production or growth. It is an added nonproductive cost; that is, inflationary. Most of our economists remain convinced that high interest rates kill inflation, when the exact opposite is true.

Nor do any of our official methods of measurement reflect the explosion in service industry costs. The current economic religion preaches the essential nature of service expansion. On the other hand, those who measure inflation apparently consider much of the sector to be nonessential. Hotel rooms, restaurant costs, up-market clothes and luxury and semiluxury food costs have all been moving up on a regular basis at more than 10 percent a year. With the rise in two-job families, a whole series of services, which are still left out of most measures of inflation, have become necessary to many people, from prepared foods to laundry. These costs have almost all been rising at around 10 percent a year.

The art market explosion -- with the participation of everyone from highly conservative pension funds to marginal speculators -- is merely a smaller version of the junk bond phenomenon, as is the market in luxury illusions. One hesitates to mention Judy Garland's little red shoes from the Wizard of Oz being auctioned off for $165,000 or bottles of virtually dead nineteenth-century wine for tens of thousands or the van Goghs and Picassos sold for tens of millions. But these are part of a surprisingly large area in which objects of no value, or of a value which bears no reasonable relationship to the sums paid, have entered into the economy. Western civilization used to limit itself to one South Sea Bubble at a time. And when it burst we would settle down for a while, severely chastened. We now run thousands of bubbles concurrently and the inflationary cycle is so strong that when one pops, the paper money immediately inflates a new one.

The inflationary speculation of the financial sectors nevertheless dwarfs all the others. What is, the difference between a Weimar banknote, a junk bond and a deposit bank preferred share floated to cover nonrecuperable loans? Nothing except appearance. All three are pure inflation. One indication of how far things have gone is the desire of business to see government intervene each time the situation gets out 6f hand. The Willingness of governments to do so, despite a supposed devotion to market forces, shows that they realize just how dangerous the current system is. The irony of deregulation is that the more freedom business is given, the more dependent it becomes upon government as the saviour of last resort.

Financial marketplaces have never been capable of self-limitation except through catastrophe. One of our accomplishments was to regulate most of these explosions out of existence. Financial deregulation has reintroduced them. A well-trained city dog kept within set parameters can look after itself for a limited period in limited circumstances. An untrained dog shows more initiative but will inexplicably lick or bite children, run away, defecate on Persian rugs, demand endless scraps from the table and get run over. We have unleashed increasingly 'untrained dogs in highly urban settings. The regulatory authorities are therefore forced to stay on permanent emergency footing in order to avoid catastrophes, while these animals wander freely across intersections and through houses.

Is it surprising, then, that inflation has dogged us for almost twenty years? Even the official sort, inaccurate and deceptively low; is constantly bubbling up, driven not by wages or wheat but by the multitude of inflationary elements we refuse to count. It is perfectly appropriate that the United Kingdom, the country that has most successfully reduced its national debt while sustaining for more than a decade a combination of extreme classic anti-inflationary policies with extreme deregulation, should today be the country least able to shake rising prices. The ability of governments in general to control their money supply as a means of controlling inflation is now virtually irrelevant. The money supply is as much in the hands of all these new indirect money printers as it is in those of any government mint. If the governments print, they are simply adding to the inflationary activities of private business. If, in an attempt to "strangle" inflation, they don't print, then they won't be able to pay their own bills.

The current situation, in which governments stand as the saviours of last resort -- having abandoned many of their intermediate powers of guidance -- actually breeds irresponsibility. And while government intervention late in the day prevents general calamities, it also maintains the fiction that the system is healthy. If the West were serious about inflation, it would have installed rigorous regulations to discourage the myriad new forms of speculation and accompanied this by interest rates of 5 percent or less. The effect would have been to discourage financial bubbles in the developed economies, while encouraging real investment in production, which translates into real growth.

Solon, in the very act of laying the foundations for Western civilization, identified the danger areas -- "Public evil enters the house of each man." In a world of self-interest and self-delusion, he kept a measured view and a measured hand, treating debts with the same evenness that he treated justice. One of his aims was to demonstrate how each man might control the speculator within himself. Even-handed, careful, antirevolutionary, viewing all individual action as part of a whole, he was perhaps the first complete man of reason; an early version of Pascal Paoli or Thomas Jefferson. And to demonstrate the dangers of believing in one's own rational skills, he completed his task and then left Athens for ten years. In this way he avoided hero worship and the resulting temptation to hold on to power in the name of glory.

His simple precepts are useful when thinking about government debt, corporate debt, futures, junk bonds, money markets, offshore funds, the speculation in capital goods, interest rates, imaginary services and in general the increasing conversion of Western monetary structures into a type of financing which creates profits but not real wealth. These are abstractions upon abstractions upon the great abstraction itself -- money. In Solon's clear and integral view, public evil has installed itself in every man's house. And it is comforting us with an inflation of self-delusion.
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Re: VOLTAIRE'S BASTARDS -- THE DICTATORSHIP OF REASON IN THE

Postby admin » Thu Jul 02, 2015 9:56 pm

PART 1 OF 2

PART III: Surviving in Fantasy Land -- The Individual in the World of Reason

Passivity is proper to domesticated animals. It can be imperfectly imposed on humans by threatening violence. It may be fully achieved by an all-encompassing system which defines existence.

"Consider your origins," Dante wrote. "You were not made to live as brutes, but to follow virtue and knowledge."

Knowledge is neither information and expertise nor an instruction manual. It is an investigation of the human as a whole being in search of doubt; an unlimited desire to understand.

The domesticated animal is unable to welcome doubt, let alone assume it. Human strengths -- language, imagery, memory, character -- are therefore converted into burdens. These tools, which promise virtue and knowledge, become a fearful prison.


18. Images of Immortality OR THE VICTORY OF IDOLATRY

There are differences between the late-twentieth-century Western television viewer and the paleolithic inhabitant of Lascaux in the Dordogne. The former sits in a half darkened room, holding a remote control device. The latter was equipped with some sort of rudimentary torch while he stared at his cave drawings. These and other differences relate more to social organization than to the sensibility with which they see the images. If anything, the Lascaux viewers had a clearer, more conscious and more consciously integrated concept of what they were seeing than we do today. Not that the seventeen- thousand-year-old paintings of bulls, horses, deer, buffalo and men are simple or primitive. In fact, they are the products of accomplished craftsmen.

We cannot know precisely what the cave dwellers saw in their images or expected from what they saw. Our guesses are based largely on comparisons with isolated civilizations which maintained until recently a theoretically similar way of life dependent on hunting, gathering and stone implements. What we do know is that the phenomenon of the man made image has always revolved around three interdependent forces -- conscious or unconscious fear, which in turn is counterbalanced by some combination of magic and ritual. This is not particular to the West. And it is as true today as it was in the paleolithic era.

The list of fears which drive civilizations is endless. Fear of the unknown, world outside the cave, outside the settlement, outside the country or world. Fear of being. unable to survive because of hunger or enemies. Fear not of death, but of ceasing to exist -- that is, fear that life is followed by a void.

The cave dwellers seem to have conceived their animal images as magic traps which might give them control over their, prey, in the same way that Christians would thousands of years later conceive many images of Christ or the Virgin Mary as miraculous. If successfully communicated with, these statues and paintings seemed to give -- indeed, in many places still seem to give -- the supplicant some control over disease, poverty or death. Just as the ritual used in order to communicate with these images was key to Christian miracles, so the same must have been true for the Stone Age hunters who prepared to seek out their prey.

With time the relationship between fear, magic and ritual has changed. None of our fears was conquered as civilizations became first sedentary and then urban. But doubt and anxiety over the most obscure of fears -- that of an external void -- grew in importance. And while magic has gradually retreated back into our unconscious -- which does not mean it has disappeared -- ritual has grown to take its place. In this civilization, in which God is dead, there is no clear sense that the high levels of endemic social doubt or angst or fear are an inheritance of the lost Christian promise of eternal life. Nor is there a recognition that the vast structural web of our society and the endlessly predictable images of television and film are successors to religious ritual.

We have been confused in part by the rapid and revolutionary change in our official view of why images are created. Until the simultaneous beginnings of the Age of Reason and the Renaissance, this craft played a social, political and above all metaphysical or religious role. From the fifteenth century on -- in the wake of the final technical breakthroughs which made it possible to paint a perfect image -- the idea of art began quietly to separate itself from craft. By the eighteenth century the divorce was more or less formal, although there have been regular attempts to reunite the two. In the early nineteenth century, museums were created for the sole purpose of aesthetic enjoyment. The idea that art is its own reason for existence has now been so firmly established that few people would question it.

And yet it is improbable that the image, which has played a fundamentally religious or magical role for more than fifteen thousand years, could simply be freed of itself in the space of a few centuries to become a mere object of art. This is where the Western experience parts company with that of other civilizations. For the last two thousand years, Christianity has presented and fought for a monotheistic, anti-pagan, anti-idolatry dogma. Those who view Christianity from the outside have always been surprised by the aggressiveness of these claims, because the reality of our worship has always contradicted them.

The monotheistic argument, for example, was immediately negated by the division of God into a trinity. This idea of three in one or one in three was so complex that Christians themselves were constantly fighting over its meaning. The Virgin Mary was then given, to all intents and purposes, the status. of a divinity, as were an increasing number of saints. In the opinion of everyone except the Christians, they had reconstituted a polytheistic religion.

The concept of the pagan was even more confusing. It indicated someone who did not worship "the true God." And yet the Muslims -- who worshipped the same God as the Christians, used the same texts and adopted most of the same moral codes -- were pagans, as were dozens of other sects who adopted minor doctrinal differences.

Finally, no civilization anywhere in the world has been so resolutely idolatrous as the Christian. The need to create and worship images designed in our own likeness is a constant in the history of the West. It is a virtually unaltered constant from the Greeks through the Romans to ourselves, with only marginal variations in the panoply of major and minor divinities. In spite of Christianity's Judaic origins; the Church managed so successfully to circumvent the Old Testament interdiction on image worship that only the images of other religions have been defined as idols. Six hundred years after Christ, Islam was provoked in large part by uncontrolled Christian idolatry. The Church responded by categorizing them as infidels -- nonbelievers.

Some religious and social orders have avoided dependence on the image or even its use. From the West's point of view, Judaism is the prime example. Islam has been almost as successful, as have Shintoism, Confucianism and, for a long period of time, Buddhism. During the nineteenth century, Western colonial administrators were constantly coming across groups in Africa and Asia who avoided creating human likenesses and were highly suspicious of images. There was the standard cliche about the native who was afraid to be photographed because he feared the photographer would capture his soul. The reaction of a Lascaux resident would no doubt have been the same.

This attitude actually makes very good sense. The native in question is an animist and does not believe in worshipping idols, but believes that everything, animate and inanimate, is alive. He is therefore an integrated part of the entire universe. He is unlikely to be frightened that death is a black hole leading to a void. Death simply returns him to the universe.

The particularity of Westerners has been their obsession with presenting gods, through images, not as devils or animals or abstractions, but as human beings. The painter's role has always stemmed from that basic metaphysical and social need. The gods live forever and we are created in their image. These repeated identifying mortal imitations do not simply reflect our dreams of immortality. The image, in idolatry as in animism, is a magic trap. In the West the painter's and sculptor's job has been to design the perfect trap for human immortality. As craftsmen their efforts were aimed for thousands of years at technical improvements. In the years around 1500, Raphael, Michelangelo and Leonardo made the final breakthroughs to the accurate representation of reality. There was, however, no accompanying metaphysical change. No heightened sense of magical power.

The Age of Reason has since witnessed a long and confused decline of the image as a source of general expectation; a decline accelerated by the inventions of the photograph and the motion picture, television 'and video. As expectations have dropped, confusion has grown. First, the confusion of a civilization without beliefs. Second, confusion over the significance of astonishingly perfected new images. As their technical power grows, the confusion they provoke also breeds distrust.

The result has been a growing chasm between the image and society. The craftsmen-artists have retreated onto a plane of their own. In their place as social participants we have two groups of image makers: the modern equivalent of the official artists, who receive approval from the museum experts; and the new ritualists, who produce electronic imitations of reality. What television and film have brought us is images realer than reality and yet, images separated from belief in a society which for the first time in almost two millennia does not believe.

The end of the Age of Reason is therefore a time in which the image is popularly felt to be false and yet also a time of idolatry, pure and simple. As electronic images have gradually slipped into a comfortable, highly structured and conservative formalism, our rational methods have been powerless to capitalize on what are, in fact, astonishing changes. A civilization of structure flees doubt. And so quite naturally, rational man has debased modern imagery into the lower ritual forms of a pagan religion.

***

Almost all civilizations have had an obsession with the possible relationship between immortality and the image, but most of them have limited the hypnotic effect of idolatrous self-reflection. The Christians took the full power of the divine image from earlier religions -- those of the Greeks and the Romans -- and integrated that pagan divinity into their own. [1] It is actually quite hard to blame the early Church fathers for doing this. They were devout men but socially and culturally unsophisticated, almost universally from lower- or, at most, middle-class backgrounds. Abruptly they found themselves thrust into the centre of affairs thanks to Constantine's Christian-inspired conquering of Rome in 312. The civilization they were expected to run was dominated by the cultured, ancient and sophisticated Roman aristocracy. Within a few years these simple priests were responsible for the theological anxieties of all the citizens of the greatest empire ever known. With so much power to be exercised, their honest simplicity, which had attracted Constantine in the first place, became a handicap.

How were they to capture the imaginations of such an enormous population, one which was devoted to a bizarre combination of rational Greek philosophy and baroque idolatry? The easy answer was to integrate both of these elements into Christianity. This solution took on the aspect of official policy when Damasus became Pope in 366. Rather than continue a failing effort to convert the Roman pagans to pure Christianity, he set about making the Church Roman. He brought in the ruling classes of the city, along with their Athenian philosophical background and their attachment to highly sophisticated imagery as a central characteristic of religion.

Only a half century later this approach was integrated into the intellectual mainstream of Christianity through the writings of Saint Augustine, who was then Bishop of Hippo in North Africa. On the subject of Christian art versus idolatry, he laid out a very fine difference between the two: "God is not the soul of all things but the maker of all souls." [2] As so often when complex distinctions are applied to simple moral questions, the effect was simply to provide justification for de facto idol worship. This approach was doubly and permanently locked in place by the arrival on the papal throne in 590 of the great Pope Gregory, who popularized and universalized the message of the Church through a simplification of the Christian message and the embrace of magic and miracles. This he did not by rejecting the sophisticated rational' idolatry of the preceding two centuries but by building on its profound assumptions.

Finally, the devotion to magic and mysticism came to fruition in the middle of the seventh century when Eastern Christians, fleeing the Muslim explosion and its condemnation of idolatry, settled in Rome and took over the Church. Between 678 and 741, eleven of thirteen popes were Greek or Syrian. Refugees from the East. They brought their obsession with miraculous images and relics. Cartloads of saintly thigh bones and pieces of the Holy Cross arrived in Rome. It wasn't long before images decorated the inside of each church and became the central focus for the parishioners' anxieties. If there was any doubt over the Western approach, it was removed during the Iconoclastic struggle in the Eastern Empire from 726 to 843. Constantinople's attempts to eradicate the rampant use of images were constantly undermined by the Pope and the Church in Rome. [3]

This focus remained in place for a thousand years -- until, that is, Christianity began to weaken beneath the pressure of a revived rationality. As the churches collapsed, the image was freed from their grasp. But it was not freed from divinity. We killed God and replaced him with ourselves. In the process man himself inherited the full, divine power of the idolatrous Christian image.

The curious thing about the pagan heritage was its artificiality. Man had first to make the image, then believe in its powers. By comparison, the animistic native -- who believes that there is life in everything and that he is an integrated part of that everything -- holds an intellectually sound position. He is part of a concrete nirvana on earth. The Buddha added a wrinkle to this with his idea of a nonconcrete nirvana. Man, he said, would have difficulty leaving this earth, but if he succeeded it would be an eternal escape.

It's worth noting, in passing, the miraculous ability of Greek culture to stir in any civilization the deep, unconscious anxiety tied to fears of mortality. then pander to it with promises tied to idolatry. The Buddhists managed for centuries without statues of the Buddha. It was the passage of Alexander the Great through India that first tempted them down the ambiguous path of Buddha images -- which are theoretically respected, not worshipped -- in somewhat the same manner that statues of the Virgin were theoretically respected, not worshipped.

As for Mohammed, he brought a clear description of Paradise to the Koran:

But for those that fear the majesty of their Lord there are two gardens planted' with shady trees. Each is watered by a flowering spring. Each bears every kind of fruit in pairs....

They shall recline on couches lined with thick brocade and within their reach will hang the fruits of both gardens.

They shall dwell with bashful virgins whom neither man nor jinnee will have touched before.

Virgins as fair as corals and rubies....

And beside these there shall be two other gardens of darkest green....

Each planted with fruit trees, the palm and the pomegranate....

Which of your Lord's blessings would you deny? [4]


It isn't surprising that this clarity should have been accompanied by a general ban on images. God had passed on the full details of heaven through his Prophet. There was no room for humans to fiddle with his description.

Strangely enough, Christ had spoken to roughly the same sort of simple desert people some seven centuries earlier and done so almost entirely in parables. But at no time did he offer a hint of what heaven was like. He said a great deal about who would get there and how, but offered not a single word on the place itself. The faithful Christian who looked for hints found instead:

"Blessed are they which are persecuted for righteousness' sake: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven."

Or, "Whosoever therefore shall humble himself as this little child, the same is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven."

Or, "A rich man shall hardly enter into the kingdom of heaven." [5]


If Mohammed passed on a detailed description of heaven, while Christ didn't describe it at all, this can only have been intentional on both their parts. And yet we are talking about the same God, the same prophets and the same heaven. Any explanation for the divergence would be mere speculation. If we take Christ at his word, he seemed to be suggesting a heaven not unlike the Buddhist nirvana. But the Christian success in Europe was unrelated to this suggestion. Instead, the very vagueness of Christ's heaven left the West free to continue its pagan devotion to the melding of the mystic with the concrete.

It was through the image that this Western imagination had always revealed, and would continue to reveal, itself. Very little from the pre-Christian past needed to be changed. Even Christ's parables fitted neatly onto the foundations of Greek mythology and philosophy. The abstract simplicity of Christianity allowed its rapid assimilation into the image madness of Roman Europe. Christ's vague heaven was an apparently revolutionary new contribution. It formalized the nascent idea of immortality. But it was Roman Europe which converted that idea into a concrete image. And it was Europe -- Greek, Roman and barbarian -- which instilled magic into the immortal dream. Miraculous statues and paintings and objects were a gift from pagan Europe to Christ's lean religion. And from the bleeding statues of Christ and the healing images of the Virgin Mary, it was only one more step to the civil image as unconscious guarantor of human immortality.

The power of the pagan image -- whether Christian or post-Christian -- has little to do with believing and a great deal to do with the myths and archetypes of Western man. A fifth-generation urban atheist is today as much a prisoner of these expectations as a medieval peasant once was. If anything has changed at all, it is that with the Renaissance, the Reformation and the rise of reason, man finally learned how to produce not just images but the perfect images that he had always dreamed would carry great power. Faced by the impotence of this progress, he succumbed to confusion and to greater inner fear.

Long before that the Christian Church had set about developing Christ's heaven into a doctrinal, concrete reality. The Church paid painters to illustrate the official heaven. These craftsmen were initiated into a complex protocol which indicated precisely where everyone would sit or stand for eternity. They formalized the idea that Christians would lie on clouds. The Church set the record straight over the exact manner in which decomposed bodies would be recomposed to perfection on Judgment Day. Again, they commissioned thousands of painters to illustrate this.

As the old Roman aristocracy gradually disappeared, the role of illustration became more, not less, essential for both magical and practical reasons. Almost everyone, including the new and diverse, indeed fractured ruling classes, was illiterate. And while the priesthood could not read out to the public reassuring illustrative holy texts on heaven, as the Muslims could, they were able to bring the people into churches where eternity was demonstrated on all the walls.

When, in the Late Middle Ages, the Church began to use its definition of heaven as a corporate tool for fundraising via such things as indulgences, it damaged the credibility of its eternity. Subsequently, under attack for corruption, it began to slide away from its earlier commitment to a concrete description of heaven. The people in turn began to believe less. At first, with the Reformation, there was a move to create new Christian churches. But increasingly the Westerners reverted to a more properly pagan use of the image -- a use which predates the conversion of Rome to Christ's cause. Today we are surrounded by millions of perfect, live images. The role they play is almost identical to that of the ancient idol: reassuring reflections whichever way man turns. What we have kept from the Christian period is the feeling that the painter and the image maker have the power to deliver a sense of eternity.

***

The slow, difficult technical progress towards the perfect capture of the image came in a disordered manner over several thousand years, with advances being made here and there or simultaneously in several places at once. The most intense scenes of this struggle took place in northern Italy from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century. In Siena, for example, each step of this creative explosion remains exposed on walls around the city like clues in an unfolding mystery.

Until the early 1500s, painters were obsessed with technical progress. They had always struggled with problems, such as perspective, in the unconscious expectation that if the perfect image could be created, something magical would happen. And so, even before rational man got hold of the idea of progress, it had been hopelessly confused between a technical process and a moral improvement.

This does not mean that the need to progress was always felt to be a simile for the quest, as in the quest for the Holy Grail. Rather, it was properly understood as an administrative process -- an advance or a progress over controlled territory. Monarchs, for example, made a royal progress across their own kingdoms. Good might come of it, or bad, or nothing, depending on the king in question and on what he wanted at that time. The contradiction between what we now expect from progress. and what we actually get is no worse than that suffered by the medieval gentry and peasantry as they dealt with the passage of a royal party. For that matter, our confusion is not greater than that of the medieval painter. All the time he was desperately seeking technical improvements, there was proof in his own work that his most powerful paintings were not necessarily the most perfect and, therefore, not the most advanced.

Duccio, for example, both progressed and was lost in the confusion created by progress. Between 1308 and 1318 he worked on the enormous front and rear of the Maesta, the altarpiece of the Cathedral of Siena. The Maesta consisted of countless small scenes on individual panels. Duccio completed each one before progressing to the next. In the process he made a series of technical discoveries unknown to any other painter. As he worked on a given panel, he was therefore obliged to notice that a few panels earlier he had made serious errors. These had not been errors at the time. It was only his own progress which made them into errors.

Doors, for example, had been placed incorrectly so that figures could not come through them. A few panels further on in the series, there is another door. This time the figures inside the room have been painted so that they could have come through the entrance.

All over the city of Siena, painters were grouped in the studios of different masters, learning from them, then going out on their own to add to what they had learned. One by one the technical secrets of the image were revealed. The final step of this progress can be glimpsed in the Piccolomini Library. There in 1505 Pinturicchio, began illustrating on the walls the glorious career of the Piccolomini family's pope, Pius II.

Pinturicchio had digested the technical lessons of those who came before him and had moved on to the point where the enormous mass of his images' was so integrated by colour and detail and by the relation of the animate to the inanimate that the viewer could feel the details about to be swallowed up by the whole. Clearly the master was on the edge of creating the miraculous perfect image.

In the ninth mural, down on the lower left-hand side, Pinturicchio painted himself. And beside him is his student Raphael, who a few years later would solve the last technical mysteries of the image. He would make the breakthrough and take the flat, painted image as far as it could go.

Others will say it was Michelangelo or Leonardo who made the actual breakthrough. No doubt they did. So much time had passed, so much progress had been made, so many craftsmen had been thinking and working, that the last step could not help but be a mass effort. The question of perspective was solved and the perfect image created between 1405 and 1515, after thousands of years of craftsmen striving towards that moment.

Perhaps Raphael was most often given the credit because he was the most unidimensional figure of the three. He was the painter's painter -- not a randy egomaniac, like Michelangelo, as famous for his life as for his painting; nor a scientist, strategist, inventor of weapons and machinery, like da Vinci. who also painted. Raphael resembled what the painter was to become in the Age of Reason: the invisible technocrat of images. With hindsight. he appears to have been the father of the "artist"; that is, of the man who painted to create beauty. But Raphael did not simply perfect the image. His greatest work was the frescoes in the Stanza della Segnatura, rooms in the papal apartments of Julius II. Their theme was the justification of the power of the Church through neo-Platonic philosophy. Julius was surrounded by thinkers who had updated this original betrayal of Christian dogma so that it still made sense -- that is, could be justified -- in the context of the humanist explosion of the Renaissance. But it was Raphael who had to turn this old internal contradiction into a unified image. The two most important frescoes were The Dispute and The School of Athens. It is not the detail of these scenes which makes them revolutionary, but that the thousands of years of search for the perfect image should have culminated in paintings which indisputably affirmed the marriage between the traditions of pagan idolatry and Christian immortality. With a vast flourish Raphael completed the pagan-Greco-Roman-Christian integration and closed the circle begun by Pope Damasus in the fourth century.

In any case, in twenty intensive years three men completed the miracle of the image. Paint became reality. The image became real, as real as paint would ever make it. The relationship between the viewed and the viewer was finally perfected. The viewer was integrated into the viewed. He came to the framed image in search of his eternal prison. He came as a willing virgin to Count Dracula, expecting the image to drink from him and to live forever.

This was a limited expectation in comparison to the Church's promise of Paradise. A bit of paint on a wall was, after all, a modest view of eternity, as modest as sleeping in a coffin during the day and coming out only at night. The image, like Dracula, was also the final reflection, unable to give out life, just as the count was invisible in a mirror.

So the viewer approached the perfect image in great expectation. He found a technical miracle. He found genius. He found emotion and beauty which seduced him in a way he had never been seduced before. But he did not find what he'd come for. This living reflection did not do to him what he had expected. Of course, like most metaphysical expectations, this one belonged in the realm of unformed yearning. There is never a blueprint for desire, and yet the perfecting of the image was one of the great disappointments of Western history.

For some twenty years after Raphael's discovery craftsmen celebrated their triumph with an outpouring of genius. [6] But gradually the subconscious failure beneath this conscious success began to slow them and to darken their perspective. The viewer has only to watch Titian's opulence and sensuous joy gradually turn tragic. With no room left for progress, the image turned and dodged and circled back and buried itself like an animal chained to its own impossible promise, searching for some way to get beyond the mortality of the real.

The conscious mind does not look at a picture with all these thoughts to the fore. It looks instead for beauty, shock value or the reflection of something it knows. Human obsessions are not tied to practicality or proof or even to public argument. The impossibility tied to them is an attraction. And yet these obsessions almost always have practical secondary effects. They produce organizations, beliefs, objects and ways of behaviour. Society is in part the result of real needs such as military, economic and social. But it is at least equally the result of unobtainable obsessions.

So, while we may come to the image in search of Dracula, we find instead reflections of our reality -- social conventions, for example, such as power relationships, established beliefs and patriotic emotions -- or we may find images which reflect our expectations for justice or material comfort, or the picture may reinforce our prejudices. The painter reflects what society hopes he will reflect. If he inspires refusal or anxiety, then he is responding to something he senses in the social body.

When Romanticism began to flourish in the late eighteenth century and the ego began to grow until it dominated public life, people abruptly found Raphael far too modest a fellow to have been the father of the perfect image. So they tended to fall into line with the description of the technical breakthroughs which had been provided by Vasari in his Lives of the Painters, written shortly after the actual events. In other words, they transferred the credit to an irresponsible, antisocial individualist, Michelangelo -- a veritable caricature of the artist in the twentieth century. If we were ever able to create a reasonable, open society, Leonardo would no doubt cease appearing to us as an overwhelming, almost forbidding, giant and the credit would be switched to him.

***
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Re: VOLTAIRE'S BASTARDS -- THE DICTATORSHIP OF REASON IN THE

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PART 2 OF 3

Though Michelangelo came to represent the artistic type of the future, he was very much part of a society in which the craftsman was an integrated element. The painter was a craftsman and a gild member. In Bruges the Flemish primitives of the fifteenth century belonged to the same craft gild as the harness-makers. glaziers and mirror makers. In Siena their carefully dated signatures were followed by such declarations as Thadeu Bartholi's "Feait fieri agelella." "Made it proud." Their signature did not relate to ego. the way the modern painter's does. To the contrary, they signed as gild members, confirming their role as craftsmen and taking public responsibility for their contribution to the community. The image, after all, had a public function. It was accessible to every element in society. You needed neither money, rank nor literacy to look at a painting or a fresco.

As the painters inched closer to the perfect image, so society became ever more committed to having itself reflected. The donors of religious pictures had begun by having themselves painted discreetly into corners, often in little medallions. Gradually, they gathered the courage to insist on being integrated into the central structure of the image. Then abruptly. there they were, as large as everyone else in sculpture as well as painting. In St. Stephen's Cathedral in Vienna the pillars are decorated with life-size statues of saints and donors mixed together. It became increasingly common in paintings to find donors kneeling before Christ at the end of a row which began with the Apostles or the local saint. It wasn't long before the Apostles were gone and the image was devoted to Christ, Mary and the local lord. Or the town council. Or the king.

In paintings of the Apocalypse -- that is, of Judgment Day -- the local burghers or lords were portrayed safely on the side of the saved as Christ cast others down. The point of this was not to impress the local serfs or whatever with the remarkable connections of their masters. Nor was it to prove publicly the holiness of these people. The point was that Christ was immortal and they were beside him. The image was like a negative of life, waiting to be developed by death.

With ever-greater frequency, the painter dressed the Saviour, his family and the saints in the latest fashion of the town where the painting would hang. This was not the result of ignorance over how they might actually have dressed. There were accurate, well-known images of biblical dress -- statues, mosaics and bas-reliefs. Nor was this an attempt to popularize Christianity. Nor to modernize it. The religion was perfectly accessible. Its message may have been distorted in various ways by churches; but the message of suffering on earth, of resurrection and of eternal life was perfectly clear.

If the Gabriel in Benedetto Bonfigli of Siena's Annunciation looked like a well-to-do dandy, his hair cut in the latest style with blond curls, then the idea was that a contemporary image could be as eternal as an angel. The three wise men in Pietro Perugino's painting of the Offering all resemble princes out of Botticelli's Spring. The reason is the same. And in Modena, there is an extraordinary transposition of ordinary citizens into biblical saints. This large group of life-size terra cotta figures by Guido Mazzoni and coloured by Bianchi Ferrari in 1509 is in the Church of San Giovanni. The figures are taking Christ off the cross. Each of them looks as if he has just walked off the streets of medieval Modena in order to give a hand with the body.

This dissolving of human actuality into the biblical promise of immortality goes beyond clothes and hair styles. In the Duomo in Orvieto, Fra Angelico and Signorelli painted an Apocalypse in which some of the figures step out of a fashion parade. But more important are the dead saved by the Resurrection and coming out of the ground. They are skeletons, becoming flesh as they rise, and chatting With each other. The painters' attention to corporal detail is libidinous. Needless to say, it is also highly secular. These rising dead are the people. This is an illustration Of precisely how they will be reconstituted. The citizens of Orvieto could come to the Duomo and count the muscles, measure the breasts, check the eye colour; This is an image of themselves, resurrected in every detail for eternity. The point is made even more insistently in the Basilica of Santa Maria degli Angeli in Assisi, where the Maestro dell'Osservanza painted a Martyrdom of Saint Bartholomew in the early l400s. On the left and right of the poor suffering saint, standing naked and bloodied, there is a line of Assisi burghers wearing fur-trimmed hats with long, wide tassels hanging down and flung elegantly over the opposite shoulder. These men are extremely well dressed for the fifteenth century. But they are inappropriately dressed for a martyrdom. The effect is that of a grotesque receiving line at a fashionable wedding. It is as if the sacred subject no longer matters, except by association. What matters is that the citizen is there, integrated with immortal people in an almost animate reflection.

All of this manoeuvring for the best spot on the wall abruptly lost its purpose once Raphael had created the perfect image and nothing magical had happened. The painters reacted by moving into overstatement. Even Titian's joyous outburst was an attempt to kick Raphael's reality into life through elaboration. More clouds, more people, more events. He was trying to take heaven by storm.

When this failed, many painters turned from the grandiose to the intimate and took a run at eroticism. Cranach the Elder's Venus and Love is a cool version of this move, with the lady, neither mythological nor goddesslike, standing naked except for a fashionable hat. The look in her eyes, coyly turned to the viewer: is clearly. a sexual invitation aimed at any man willing to join her on the wall. This centrefold approach, to which Playboy owes a great deal, was so popular that towards the middle of the sixteenth century Cranach painted almost identical versions for admirers all over Europe. Bronzino's allegory Venus, Cupid, Time and Folly dropped any attempt at coolness. It is one of the most erotic scenes ever painted. The skin of the lady -- its soft whiteness -- is palpable. A thin, postpubescent Cupid has slipped an arm around and beneath one breast to take the other between his fingers while his lips brush hers. She has the essence of female nakedness, her body turned to the viewer, her thighs about to part, exuding a mixture of placidity and expectant energy. It is difficult to understand why the British authorities periodically set about seizing pornographic films, when something as explicit as this is hanging in the National Gallery.

From the body, painters turned back to society, but in a vague, uninvolved way. They began to redescribe the scenes they knew, this time with the full skills of perspective. They carried society with them in flights of fantasy, such as those of Fragonard, who attempted to make life better than it could ever have been with impossibly romantic colours in an edgeless, overflowing nature filled with opulent women and joyous couples. Or they used new gimmicks -- like de la Tour's concentrated light and shadow -- in an attempt to trick the image into animation. The English tried a naturalism which seemed to extinguish any barrier between the subject and the portrait. Gainsborough put Mr. and Mrs. Andrews under a tree with their fields behind. There they are as they really were -- self-assured, boring and pompous. They are almost alive enough to drone on about their distant blood ties to a duke or their good shooting. Other painters began to fall into producing unapologetic propaganda. They leaped onto the new Hero bandwagon of the late eighteenth century and helped to pump up revolutionaries and generals.

The greatest Hero, Napoleon, had David, the greatest artistic Hero worshipper, at his side, along with a flock of other painters -- Gros, Regnault and two of David's students, Ingres and Gerard. They were often called romantics because of a style which married the highly personal and the grandiose. When applied to Napoleon and his Empire, this revealed itself as a combination of base sentiment and idolatry. Their supportive relationship with those in power created the illusion that painters were still the community members they had always been -- that David, in particular, was a modern version of the old burgher, gild member, craftsman of the Middle Ages. Not at all. He was a servant of power, not a constituent part. He made his own attitude towards Napoleon perfectly clear: "In the past altars would have been erected in the honour of such a man." [7] His paintings were those altars, In spite of his revolutionary politics, David developed no existence in his own right. He developed instead into a worshipper. This demonstration of the painter as servant solidified the whole Beaux Arts approach, which locked "art" into a narrow technical process. This was in turn limited to a narrow choice of classical subjects. In return the painter might gain false respectability -- not as a useful craftsman but as a delicate creator of beauty who needed protection from the real world.

There are many explanations for the gradual separation of the craftsman from the artist and the accompanying loss by the painter of his role as a member of society. And yet it is hard to avoid noticing that the first signs of this division came on the heels of the perfection of the image. Throughout the Renaissance, the painter continued to think of himself ,as a craftsman. But the sense of his potential mystical powers, which society felt were dependent on his skills as a craftsman, began to evaporate the moment Raphael broke the technical barrier. The painter suffered from an unspoken social rejection which provoked his slow decline into artistry.

The art historian R. G. Collingwood placed the beginning of the distinction between fine arts and useful arts in the eighteenth century. [8] Put another way, by the eighteenth century society was beginning consciously to doubt that art was useful.

The craftsman-become-artist reacted to his forced marginality the way social outcasts often do. He stood on his dignity. As he was not wanted, he became grand. As his social standing dropped, he became nonconformist, individualistic, irresponsible, moody, "bohemian." It was then that he switched his allegiance from Raphael to Michelangelo, an antisocial figure somewhat in the modern mold. But these new 'artists' were gradually slipping towards a definition of beauty which, in social terms, meant irrelevance. They were no longer called upon to reflect society, and so automatically, nor could they criticize or propose alternatives with any weight. As art withdrew from society, so it came to be a form of simple refusal or of anarchy.

And as the image lost its purpose, along with the potential for magic, so the artist began to slip away from it. Delacroix was among the first. In 1832 he escaped both physically and mentally from the Beaux Arts dictatorship by going to North Africa. He came back with rushing, disturbed, impressionistic images, particularly of horses in battle. In 1849 he began two enormous frescoes in St. Sulpice in Paris. Much of what is to come later in the century can be seen there in his Jacob wrestling with the Angel Gabriel. The light might have been by Monet. On the ground there is a hat van Gogh could have painted. The Impressionist slide quickly turned into a stampede, and early in the twentieth century the image had been rushed out of sight by abstraction. Forty years later, the perfected image reappeared in a series of new schools -- realist, hyperrealist, natural-realist, magic-realist -- as the artists made a strange attempt to create images more animate than those of the photographers and filmmakers of the twentieth century. The effect was surprising, but still the magic eluded them.

***

This flight from the image reflected a series of astonishing events. In 1839 the first photograph appeared. Delacroix was in full career. Gustave Moreau hadn't begun. Manet was seven. Cezanne was born with the photograph, Monet a year later. In 1845 the photographic plate was replaced by photographic film. Three years later Gauguin was born; van Gogh, eight years later; Toulouse-Lautrec not until 1864.

All of them came into a world awash with new, perfect images. From the technical point of view, almost any photograph was better than a Raphael or a Leonardo. And almost any idiot could produce one. In spite of this revolutionary change, the image itself still had not come alive. Instead it seemed to have retreated, yet again, just beyond the photographer's grasp. As the painters turned to abstraction, in denial of the image, or to surrealism, as if to mock it through the grotesque, it seemed· as if, in their despair, they regretted even having believed that technical perfection was the secret to bringing it alive. And yet, there had always been painters whose power lay more in their mystical strengths than in their craftsmanship. And despite the twentieth century's romanticization of the creative process, these mystics were as far away from the modern idea of the artist as they were from the medieval profession of craftsman.

Even among the finest craftsmen, there was often an element of animist genius which overwhelmed and sometimes eliminated their skills. Duccio worked hard to eliminate his errors, but many remained. We can see these errors, but we can also see that the paintings are masterpieces -- far, greater, far more touching, more alive, than thousands of paintings by other very good painters who did not make any serious errors simply because they worked a few years later.

This is self-evident. But if the perfecting of the image was not essential to the quality or power of paintings, then the general and innate values of structure and expertise were actually in doubt even before the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when progress and reason blossomed as absolute, inviolable truths.

What is at stake in the case of painting is not simply whether a lack of perfection may succeed where perfection fails. If that were the case, it would be enough to note the superiority of Duccio, Carpaccio, and Pinturicchio's flawed work over the technically perfect canvases of, say, Veronese, Fragonard and Rubens. Nor is the point that genius -- as it is now understood -- may he more important than skill. In fact, genius as it appears in the mystical strain of painting is a refutation of genius as the modern West understands it.

This phenomenon isn't limited to a few oddball painters. Elements of mysticism can actually be found in even the most brilliant purveyors of skill and genius. What, for example, of Duccio and his doorway error in one of the Maesta panels? He solved that problem a few scenes later. With his new knowledge and improved skills, he could have gone back and corrected the doorway perspective. He didn't. Did he consciously decide that this incorrect image accomplished something he couldn't technically justify?

Look, for example, at the angels he painted throughout the Maesta panels. They seem familiar. Timeless. They are curiously old-fashioned in comparison to the rest, and yet they are also curiously modern. A fire shoots out from them, like a jet engine propelling their bodies forward. This could be seen as a silly, literal interpretation of how angels fly. Yet somehow it isn't silly. They seem almost to be out of another painting, if not out of another world. They reappear in the work of other painters in an equally strange manner. Perhaps it isn't so surprising to find precisely the same mystical, angelic energy a century later in the same city in the paintings of Soma di Pietra.

In Pinturicchio's frescoes illustrating the life of Pope Pius II, there is one scene in which all the cardinals are lined up before the Pope. They are crowned by the mass of their own hats, which sit like a gathered flock of snowy owls about to rush into flight straight at the viewer. They dance together on the men's heads, taking on peculiar angles and appearing to be three times bigger than the men who wear them. They are technically imperfect and yet the essence of the cardinals has been captured in their hats.

Until Raphael, the mystic strand was usually buried in the work of mainstream painters. Whenever it emerged it did so within images commissioned by the Church or the nobility or the town council or one of the gilds. Mysticism often appeared through the gap which remained between genius and incomplete skill. With Raphael that gap was filled. Over the next four centuries, the painters slipped away from society and the mystics gradually became a separable but minor strand in the background. The fact that they were irrational, antisocial in the conventional sense and therefore dangerous accentuated this marginality. Nevertheless, their paintings and objects continued to find a way to the public and to provoke reactions which society found disturbing.

Mysticism was seen as the last refuge of superstition. This was confirmed for rational man by the existence of relatively crude religious images which continued to exert an irrational influence over people. Often this was indeed little more than superstition, based, for example, on some theoretically miraculous event in the past. Here and there, however, there are images which have only to be looked at with an open mind to confirm that they do contain an active irrational force.

The crucifix which "spoke" to Saint Francis, telling him to "go repair my House which is falling into ruin" is a perfect example of this phenomenon. It is not the most beautiful of images. An unknown craftsman painted it around 1000 A.D. and the crucifix then hung in San Damiano, a small rural church. By the time Francis saw it, the church was run down, almost a ruin. He misunderstood the message, thinking it meant he was to rebuild the little stone building and not the Church of Rome.

There is still a force within this image. Of course, the religious circus which now engulfs Assisi gets in the way. No one will ever be able to look at the crucifix in the way Francis did -- alone, in a run-down, rural church -- that is to say, alone and at peace. Nevertheless, the force of the image can still be felt.

The changed position of the mystic strain after the breakthroughs of the Renaissance can be seen as early as the pictures of the German Grunewald. He used the new technical progress where it suited him and ignored it where it didn't. His Resurrection of 1515 for the Isenheim Altar seems to be one with painters of the past such as Uccello, but also with William Blake in the eighteenth century and Dali in ours. Christ rises in a spray of colours which resemble an unreal burst of electricity. The soldiers guarding his body tumble away in an inexplicable manner as he rises. A century later El Greco was fully engaged in deforming reality, for example, in The Opening of the Fifth Seal. The colours are seemingly uncontrolled. The bodies of the resurrected float in an imprecise and deformed manner. The picture is more an emotion than an image.

The purely mystical strain of painting spread as the power of reason prospered. In fact, Heinrich Fussli and William Blake worked while the waves of reason rolled high around them. In 1782, the year before Blake published his first book, Poetical Sketches, Fussli's painting The Nightmare caused a sensation across Europe. He portrayed a woman dressed, but collapsed erotically over the end of her bed, bent backwards in an impossible manner. A small shadowy monster is crouched on her breasts. A maddened horse peers in through dark curtains. Fussli's appeal to the nonrational made an enormous impact. William Blake's strange, disassociated figures conveyed that same sense of the uncontrollable. His angels, for example, appear awkward, naive, technically stilted, unbelievable. In a sense they are all of those things. They are very like the angels of Duccio and Soma di Pietra. They fly in the face of five centuries of technical progress. And yet they are almost alive. By a series of gestures, which we cannot identify intellectually as genius, Blake has almost brought it off. He has almost captured the image.

Goya was then in the full flood of his career. In his case, it seemed as if the Spanish royal family, who paid for so much of his work, didn't understand the forces he was releasing. His painting of the May 3, 1808, massacre of Spaniards by the occupying French forces was no doubt applauded by the nationalists, including the Spanish nobility. But those aren't simply Spanish peasants being executed. There is something wild and unearthly about them. They seem to be shouting at their executioners. It is an eternal cry of refusal -- as much a cry of the Spanish Civil War, almost a century and a half later, as of any peasant uprising at any time in any country. It is more a mystical image of the human condition than the reflection of a single event.

Compare its rough, crazed feel to the perfect, lacquered pictures David was producing at the same time; works of skill and intelligence. They are moving, but moving in a singular way. They are remarkable political tools which assemble the viewer's emotions with a purpose in mind. Goya, meanwhile, was painting explosions. The viewer has only to look in order to feel a ripping apart within himself. Perhaps that is a description of the eternal -- a formless, perpetual explosion.

Fussli, Blake and Coya were succeeded by men like Gustave Moreau, who began before the Impressionists and outlasted a number of them. The unnatural staginess of the mystical is there in his Oedipus and the Sphinx or in Prometheus, along with aggressive, inexplicable colours, which might have been by Grunewald. The subjects are classical but the feeling is barbaric. Mysticism was moving back towards centre stage, in part because the other pain ted images were collapsing under the weight of the photo and of the cinematograph, which arrived in 1896. But it was also propelled by a presentiment of ending -- of death, in fact -- which grew as the twentieth century began.

A turn-of-the-century group of painters in Vienna led the way in this dark prophesy. Every stroke of Egon Schiele's brush seemed to animate death, again like a Grunewald crucifixion. His 1913 portrait of Heinrich Benesch and his Son, for example, is a prophesy of the slaughter which will begin a year later and last for five years. The self-assured father's powerful hand is on the shoulder of his veallike son, leading him to death. The father thinks he sees but does not. The son sees, but feigns blindness, All of this is conveyed irrationally through the limitations of a theoretically conventional family portrait.

Once World War I had begun, an even deeper pessimism took hold. All the Blakean signs returned in the person of Magritte, who had the polished but telltale; awkward, almost gauche style which kept saying to the viewer -- "Look what you've done! You fool! What will you do now?"

So much of what was happening to the image in the last thirty years of the nineteenth century and the first forty of this century was apparently new. Certainly these changes seemed to carry the optimism of newness and of great excitement. Invention was felt everywhere. Barriers were being crossed. Not only was the image finding new forms at the time, but those pictures still have the shock of newness when seen today.

And yet all the revelry of that period was Jess a celebration than a shattering. The Cubists, the Surrealists, the Expressionists, the frenzies of obscure lines, the slabs of raw paint or raw steel, the lumps of stone -- what was it all, except a dance of death? Brilliant, overwhelming and evocative of man's discomfort with his own rational civilization. But the dance of what death? On one level, of the image. More important, it was the death of a certain expectation from the image. In terms of art history, each of these schools deserves great attention. In terms of civilization's relationship to art, they were part of a single demonstration that the image was no longer a pillar of society, as it had been in the Middle Ages; nor a constructive critic, as it had often been during the romantic rise of the ego; nor even a servant of power. The new image neither reflected nor criticized the rational, structured world that man was creating. Instead it exploded in turmoil, off on a separate plane, as if it had no place in this new world. For the first time in history, the image was refusing society.

As for the painters, it wasn't surprising that they had been jumping so high for so many years. Cubism was pulled out of a hat in 1907, eleven years after the cinematograph was invented and just as it was gathering steam. Surrealism was officially founded in 1924, three years after Charlie Chaplin's first feature, The Kid, revolutionized the moving image. Dali joined the Surrealists in Paris in 1929, and Picasso began his distorted nudes in 1930, both hard on the heels of Mickey Mouse's first appearance in 1928. In that year, Mr. Mouse's film, Steamboat Bill, made him the most famous cartoon character in the world. He -- a mere image -- rapidly became the most famous individual in the world. Period. According to polls, he still is, Guernica and the great Surrealist Exhibit in London came in 1936, the same year that television was introduced, also in London. This was six years after talking movies, five after both Donald Duck and Chaplin's masterpiece, City Lights, and one year after the first comic book. Snow White made her appearance in 1937 and in 1939 the first American television broadcast took place in New York.

Run as fast as the most remarkable painters of the twentieth century could, the image was constantly outstripping them. They were hindered in this race by their own gradual withdrawal into specialization on an "artistic" plane, separate from society. This act of self- categorization also brought them into the range of a new breed of art historians. As the painters ran desperately to catch up with technology, they were being pecked all over by flocks of curators, art critics, dealers and technocratic art historians, all of whom were multiplying with such rapidity that they have now become a prevalent species.

The earlier generations of art patrons and historians had often been obsessive people, desiring to touch, to feel, to hold, to stare, to attempt some mystical relationships with the image. The specialists tend now to be pariahs of art, trained and graded by the specific criteria essential to contemporary education and, if anything, frightened by the potential power of the image. Their relationship to creativity is rarely one of love or obsession. They are salaried to it. They seem more comfortable with analysis, as if a dozen or so photographs of a masterpiece, taken under perfectly controlled conditions in neutral isolation, would best satisfy them. They could then destroy the original and limit the public's understanding to their own photo-based analysis of the measurable elements. You cannot be an expert in genius or in the mystical. Genius and the mystical therefore frighten them.

And since these experts controlled the major galleries, it was not long before they were able to apply their standards to the Western definition of what was art. New generations of painters -- cut off from the reverberations which their predecessors had felt, thanks to their integration into society -- instead found that the only sustained reverberations came from the experts. In the ensuing confusion, many painters began producing directly for the museums -- that is, for the technocrats of art.

That is now the dominant theme in Western painting. On the surface, it appears as if painters have turned away from egocentrism in order to reintegrate themselves into a world of public walls and public images, not unlike the gild craftsmen of the Middle Ages. But the resemblance is only superficial. Carpaccio, for example, painted public walls under contract from the constituted authorities. Those authorities were social, political and religious. They were not artistic authorities. His illustrations addressed that society's emotional and mythological needs, not his own and not those of image experts. Curiously enough, his integration into the social fabric, and the integration of his images into the public dream, gave him the personal freedom to release his full genius and mystical powers. The post-Raphael painter worked from the increasingly awkward position of the outsider but found his energy in the reverberations which he felt as a recently freed social critic. The second half of the twentieth century has seen painters gradually lose contact with that source of energy, as their link to society has been reduced largely to emanations from a socially irrelevant group of art experts. This constitutes a modern reestablishment of the Beaux Arts dictatorship.

Only the painters capable of dragging the mystical power out of themselves seem able to work productively within the breakdown of our society. They move untouched among the forces released by that break down. They seem unaffected by the fashions and standards dictated by the art experts. Today's confusion doesn't bother them. Instead of being disconcerted by our loss of centre, they seek ways of describing it. The secret, they have found, is to harness the violent, rampant forces released by that ,loss of centre. Theirs is an animist approach.

It is hardly surprising that Blake's images and words are more popular today than they have ever been. Nor is it surprising that the Englishman, Francis Bacon, was among the dominant modern painters. He said that he admired the craft of the Egyptians, "who, were attempting to defeat death." He denied that he was trying to do the same, because he didn't believe in an afterworld. But that isn't the point. So much has moved in this century from the unconscious to the conscious. Almost alone, death and dreams of eternity have disappeared into the deep unconscious. "I am a realist," Bacon said. "I try to trap realism." [9]

No one has trapped the violence and self-destruction of our time so completely as he has. Those truncated, deformed bodies are as eternally alive in his canvases as the reconstituted dead are in Fra Angelico's Resurrection. In fact, their shapes, disproportionate mouths and eyes and heads broken up like jigsaw puzzles, express the reality of how many people see or feel themselves. In a society as determined as ours to replace social and moral cohesion with unaffective structure and technical progress, these violent, magic images of mortality are among the few available reminders of reality.

***

For most painters, however, the century has brought an ever-growing pessimism over the power of their craft. If they were disillusioned in the early sixteenth century by the limited effects of the perfect painted image, they were, doubly wounded by the arrival of the photograph. Photographers have gone on developing their technology and the public has expectantly followed.

The moving picture had given them greater hope that the power of the image lay in that direction, as did sound, then colour. From 1948 on there was large-scale television broadcasting in the United States." I Love Lucy" began in 1951. The first CinemaScope movie was shown in 1953, The film chosen for this experiment with a wide screen was appropriately The Robe, a story tied to Christ's immortality. Walt Disney established his regular television slot in 1954. The last few years have contributed halls with wraparound sound and most recently, computer-generated images of people and objects which appear to be real but can take any form, melt, divide and do endless things which in reality are impossible.

No doubt the commercial holograph is next. Films will then have the density of stage plays without losing the reality of the screen and of location shooting. In 1981 the director John Waters produced a "scratch and sniff" film called Polyester. Viewers carried a numbered card into the hall. From time to time a number would flash on the screen; the public would scratch that section of the card; and the hall would fill with an appropriate smell ranging from dirty running shoes to roses. The only technically producible element missing will soon be modulated viewer emotions. Huxley described in Brave New World in 1932, just after the arrival of the talking movie, how this could be done with carefully modulated intoxicating spray. The result was "An All-Super-Singing, Synthetic-Talking, Coloured, Stereoscopic Feely. With Synchronized Scent-Organ Accompaniment." [10] There is no reason to think that we won't go that far.

We seem to be nearing the end of the process in which the rough, pictorial lines first scratched and painted on cave walls have come to fruition. The final result is already known. We have captured the perfect image and it is dead. Worse still, it is not exactly dead. We have created images beyond reality. Images not alive and yet more real than those which are alive with flesh and blood. We can so easily create these hyperrealist animations that masses of them are permanently available. And being perfect imitations, they are truly believable. Even the creator of a TV movie or a rock video can capture a form more perfect than any accomplished by the genius of Raphael.

On the other hand, heavy restrictions are placed on these creators by the nature of the electronic image. Marshall McLuhan talked of television having to adapt to process rather than to packaged product. [11] Decades later there is still no wide understanding of just how accurate this statement was. Both the public and the critics are increasingly fixated on how terrible the product is and convinced that corporations or financial interests or individuals are the guilty parties.

But television has revealed itself to be a more interesting control device than most people imagine. It isn't particularly effective at exercising control over the viewer. It is too obvious as a propaganda or manipulation device. On the other hand, the electronic system -- the machinery -- does exercise a powerful control over those who are employed to make it work. The product needs of a broadcast channel or network are both unlimited in quantity and very limited in scope and variety. Those whose profession it is to produce cannot avoid altering their view of life in order to satisfy this insatiable but extremely specific hunger.

Beyond the lens, there is the fullness of the real world -- disorderly, unexpected, filled with endless layers of expectation, understanding and misunderstanding. Its very size and uncontrollability has always made the viewer seek a focused interpretation in the creative image. Until the invention of the photograph, the painter's freeze-frame of reality sought both eternity and universality. Even a still life of a pear sought to capture something enormous through the specific. The viewer seeks that same eternal universality in the unfrozen frames of television.

The, essential nature of television, however, relates not to the viewer's need for a reflective moment but to the system's to fill airtime. The sheer quantity of material required and the speed with which it must be created, eliminates the possibility of searching for true reflections. The system rewards productivity, not creativity. It does not forbid or eliminate creativity. Not rewarding it is enough to minimize such efforts.

When television began only a few decades ago, its employees set out with both optimism and some idealism. The movie director Norman Jewison talks about the creative. talent originally gathered together in television. Through the 1950s these people worked with originality and skill to convert reality into interesting reflections. Live theatre was experimented with in new ways thanks to television's power to deliver instantaneous images to the public. The situation comedies had a fresh, sometimes crazed feeling, as radio and vaudeville traditions were adapted to the little screen. Newsmen like Edward R. Murrow seemed to have found an opening for presenting real events in a way that was partially freed from the old propaganda methods.

The conventional view is that, as the system grew, so did the potential profits. Packagers were brought in to produce the pablum we know today. And advertisers came to understand their power to discourage any political edge. Both these factors are very real. But scenarios which require arch villains are rarely accurate. Was there really a handful of individuals strong enough to wrestle down a phenomenon like television with the intention of castrating it? If so, why did a similar decline take place on publicly owned channels around the world -- even in countries where there was no competition from privately owned networks? British television, public and private, looks good when compared to the American wasteland. But this is only an effect of comparison.

The ability of machinery to suck up programming at the speed of sound, then spew it out into an endlessly expandable void can only have helped exhaust the creative. But was the way the programs sank into nowhere which discouraged the talented. Their images were not sitting in bookstores and libraries or hanging in galleries, museums or on the walls of houses or being projected in cinemas. They were simply beamed to an invisible audience, past whose eyes they might or might not flash, depending upon an arbitrary turning of dials or pushing of remote-control buttons. Surveys repeatedly show that for every person who watches a program, two or three other viewers glance at bits of it.

It is often said of the television-generation viewers -- which now includes most people in the West under forty -- that they have never been alone. That idea is typical of a civilization which denigrates accurate memory. Until the middle of the nineteenth century people were never alone. Families were grouped together in poverty or in riches. Even servants were integrated into the lives of their employers. Sex, for the poor, was a relatively public event. since families rarely had more than one or two rooms. In some societies couples were formally allotted moments alone for copulation. The basket weavers of Valabrego, a few miles from Avignon, lived in large, single-roomed group dwellings. They had a formal rotation system which left each couple alone for thirty minutes on Saturday. This was still going on in the 1940s. In the countryside of Europe and the poorer areas of North America, privacy became a dominant theme only after World War II.

To say that the television generation has never been alone, simply because it is in the constant presence of an animation machine, is certainly to treat the image as reality. It could more accurately be argued that people have never been so alone or so silent. For the first time in history, people are not gathering in families or larger groups to sing or play instruments or games. Television has removed the need for self-entertainment.

Nevertheless, it is the needs of the television structure, and not of the viewing public. which have forced the production emphasis from content to process. As the system has evolved. the creators have come to understand so perfectly the needs of the machinery that they have learned to avoid the temptations of reality. This is as true of news as it is of drama and sitcom.

A real event is not necessarily a television event. First, it must be visual and the camera must be there. This puts things such as trade disputes at a disadvantage and favours those faits divers which leave traces -- plane disasters or oil spills, for example. It also favours personalized political stories over policy questions. The case of an unfaithful or drunken politician can be dealt with like drama. A politician who favours arms spending or arms control is boring on television. Judge Clarence Thomas's confirmation hearings were of little interest on television so long as they dealt with his legal opinions. Concrete debate over his sexual habits made perfect viewing. The rise of CNN (Cable News Network) canonizes the television view of reality as concrete, action-packed visuals. Wars make good television, providing the action is accessible and Prolonged. The Middle East, for example, is an ideal setting for television war. Cameras can be permanently on the spot. and a fixed scenario of weekly car bombs, riots and shelling ensures that the television structure will have ongoing material.

This perpetual motion machine works effortlessly if the flood of images illustrates situations the viewer already understands. That is one of the explanations for the system's concentration on two or three wars when there are forty or so going on around the world. The others are eliminated because they are less accessible on a long-term basis. Or because the action is less predictable and regular. Or because the issue involved does not fit easily into the West's over-explained, childlike scenarios of Left versus Right or black versus white. Or 'because the need for endless images makes television structures unwilling to undertake the endless verbal explanations and nonvisual updates which would be required for the other thirty-seven wars to be regularly presented.

McLuhan pointed out that we are "poised between two ages -- one of detribalization and one of retribalization." [12] One of the main forces on the side of retribalization is television and, indeed, the motion picture. Television has revealed itself to be the most provincial of the communication systems. The frenetic need for moving images includes the need that these images speak a language understood by the viewer.

Thus the American president speaking English is virtually absent from French and German television, as are the French president and the German chancellor speaking their languages on' American television. Audiences most often see foreign heads of state walking or getting in and out of planes. They are reduced to minor dramatic actions because television requires motion. A journalist will explain in a voiceover why these inoffensive. irrelevant images are being shown.

The whole world does appear ready to devour an unlimited quantity of third-rate, dubbed U.S. sitcoms. But these do nothing to increase international understanding. Programs like "Dynasty" simply reinforced local, single-syllable ideas of the United States." Dallas" increased international understanding of Americans to the same extent that the Charlie Chan movies contributed to an understanding of the Chinese, or Maurice Chevalier to an understanding of the French.

As for public affairs programming -- often compared to newspaper or magazine or even radio journalism -- it is rarely identified correctly as a descendant of the painted image. Television reporting is only related to traditional journalism because of their shared subject matter. The confusion is increased by the enormous efforts which are made by a small number of people, usually on publicly owned networks, to force the image into an uncomfortable and temporary marriage with information and interpretation. This requires a constant struggle to slow the images and to force unexpected questions onto a system which prefers expected answers. This is quality television and wherever it is found, it makes an impact. But the moment the people involved in production release their hold on the machinery, it rushes ahead without any memory of the real journalistic experience. inevitably, they are forced to let go.

Journalism attempts to deal with a wild, undisciplined world. Television seeks the smooth image which provides continuity and reassurance. The more successfully a public affairs program introduces this roughness, the greater the pressure to discontinue the program or change its personnel. This is often put down to the specificity of advertisers on private television or to government financing of public television. But why, then, is it that print journalism prospers happily when the news is rough and disturbing? After all, the same sort of people own newspapers and television networks. The same companies advertise in both places.

The answer is that television and film have nothing to do with the history of language and everything to do with images and what we now call the history of art. The evening news on television does not belong in the same area of understanding as the daily newspaper or political history or political philosophy. Rather, the newscaster -- whether it be a local talking head recounting three-alarm fires or Walter Cronkite, Richard Dimbleby, Christine Ochrent or Dan Rather -- belongs in the same column as Saint Francis performing miracles through the images painted of him by Giotto and Bonaparte crossing the Alps in glory thanks to David's brush. As always with the image, it is the technical structure which dominates, unless the individual genius of the creator can rise above what is rationally possible. On television, it is impossible. There production is a group activity in which the creators themselves are a minority.

When the viewer settles down to watch the news or a sitcom, he or she is watching an image which arrives by unbroken line from Giotto and Duccio and Raphael, with all the expectations and promises that stretch back to the figures on the walls of the caves. And so Indiana Jones and "Dallas's J.R. -- one of the few international figures of television -- both must carry a little responsibility for the failure of the perfected image to deliver immortality.

***
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