Colin Tudge reflects on the upcoming by-election in Clacton on August 13
To my chagrin, Nigel Farage went to my school, Dulwich College, albeit 21 years after I did. He, or rather his parents, paid the fees. I, like by brother before me, went on a scholarship; a direct grant of the kind that is long since discontinued. Thus my grudge against Farage is to some extent personal. At its best the old school has a great deal going for it, including some outstanding teachers, and he seems to be doing his best to bring it into disrepute.
For Farage, I suggest, together with his apparent role model Donald Trump, is the precise antithesis of what a politician ought to be. Leo Tolstoy no less, who lived his life under the Tzars, thought we would be better off as anarchists, without governments at all. In his essay On Anarchy in 1900 he wrote:
“The Anarchists are right in everything; in the negation of the existing order; and in the assertion that, without Authority, there could not be worse violence than that of Authority under existing conditions. They are mistaken only in thinking that Anarchy can be instituted by a revolution. But it will be instituted only by there being more and more people who do not require the protection of governmental power … There can be only one permanent revolution – a moral one: the regeneration of the inner man”
Tolstoy in turn had a huge influence on Gandhi.
But in practice we probably do need governments, and although governments should include a far greater variety of people than they generally do they seem bound to need some professional politicians who are supposed to know how to meet our needs and to turn our wish-lists into policy. The politicians should be democratically elected men and women who are willing to take on the burden of leadership, which is indeed a huge burden which most of us for all kinds of reasons would rather not be lumbered with. Once appointed, however, those leaders should surely heed the teaching of Jesus as recorded by St Mark (10:42-44):
“… whoever would be great among you must be your servant, and whoever would be first among you must be slave of all”
But Farage (and Trump, or Putin, or Netanyahu, or Xi Jinping, and the rest) do not seem to see themselves as the people’s or the world’s servants, although they are wont to claim to be so. Many politicians really do see themselves as servants – there are some truly saintly people in politics and a few sometimes in government – but the world’s most powerful leaders certainly do not. They aspire, instead, to be autocrats. Autocrats seek at least in the first instance to get the people onside by persuasion. Some in the history of the world have been accomplished rhetoricians, and some were truly eloquent. Hitler studied the arts of theatre. He derived his extravagant gesticulations from opera. If persuasion fails the autocrats do not hesitate to back up their rhetoric with hitmen (like Trump’s ICE warriors) or tear gas and fire-hoses or even, when things get really out of hand, with rifles and tanks, as in the Tiananmen Square massacre in Beijing in 1989 (which these days in China it is illegal to refer to. The word “Tiananmen” is in the Chinese Index Expurgatorius).
But autocrats, almost invariably, are also mountebanks. They promise far more than they can ever, or even try, to deliver. They generally make some people richer – starting with themselves and their cronies — but most people, usually, are worse off under their rule, and often far worse off. Trump is the modern archetype. He came to power by promising to defend American working people from the oppression and contumely of the snobs and self-seeking intellectuals of the West and East coasts, and put paid to the European parasites who strove to live on American largesse, and to make all Americans better off and America Great Again. Yet in practice, as even some of his erstwhile followers are beginning to notice, things aren’t working out as promised. The general cost of living, and particularly the price of gas, continues to rise; and in a country so vast, with poor public transport, the motor car really does matter, at least for the foreseeable future. And the US also finds itself at war, which it wasn’t before. So Trump may eventually get his come-uppance – but not yet; and the American people and the world in general will be sweeping up the mess he has left in his wake for decades to come. Although the world will never quite recover. Waste, and wasted opportunity, can never quite be made good, and each disaster, each act of folly, is another turn of the ratchet. The Greek concept of hubris applies to autocrats in spades.
Autocrats generally seek too to stay in power by promising to protect the people against some mortal threat — and if there isn’t a real threat, they invent one. Britain has not been a full-blown autocracy since the days of William the Conqueror but I and my generation lived the first few decades of our lives under the real or perceived threat from the autocracies first of Stalin and then of Nikita Khruschev, with the ever-present threat of nuclear war. I never felt that threat was real but a lot of people did, and it had to be taken seriously. In the event, instead, the rival camps settled into the Cold War, which officially ended in 1991 when the Berlin Wall came down and the USSR ceased to be. But Putin evidently aspires to reinstate the USSR and indeed to re-create the Empire of Peter the Great and Putin’s Russia is again the perceived enemy, together with Xi Jinping’s China, for the erstwhile “sleeping giant” has well and truly awakened.
But here’s a twist. For as all the world knows, Trump is not quite the autocrat that he would clearly like to be and he has a more than sneaking admiration for the full-blown autocrats of Russia and China. For there is a new phenomenon at work in the world of politics. As the American historian and journalist Anne Applebaum brilliantly describes in her Autocracy Inc (definitely a must-read), autocracy has emerged as a force in its own right. More important than the traditional divides between East and West or Left and Right is the struggle between autocracy and democracy. She writes:
“Among modern autocrats are people who call themselves communists, monarchists, nationalists and theocrats….Unlike military or political alliances from other times and places, this group operates not like a bloc but rather like an agglomeration of companies, bound not by ideology but rather by a ruthless, single-minded determination to preserve their personal wealth and power: Autocracy Inc”
The wondrously prescient George Orwell anticipated this state of affairs. Thus in his essay The English People, written in 1944 and published in 1947 he wrote:
“All the cults that have been fashionable in the last dozen years, Communism, Fascism, and pacifism, are in the last analysis forms of power worship”
And in the closing chapters of 1984, written in 1948, a character called O’Brien, representing the all-dominant, mythical Big Brother, explains the thinking behind the dreadful dystopia that “the Party” has gone to such pains to create:
“The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness: only power, pure power ….. The German Nazis and the Russian Communists … pretended, perhaps even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly for a limited time, and that just round the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that … Power is not a means, it is an end”
Trump and Putin could surely echo the thought. Farage is not in their league, of course, but he surely aspires to be. Trump promised to enrich the working people of Middle America and in fact has made “ordinary” Americans worse off although, allegedly, he has added a few billions to his own fortune since he became president for the second time. Farage too promises to defend the good people of Clacton and working people in general from the ravages of the British Establishment and of the modern economy and of course of foreign immigrants but apparently he is rarely seen in Clacton and he too has added considerably to his own fortune since becoming an MP (without doing any demonstrably useful work). His legacy is Brexit, which nowadays is widely and almost universally seen as a disaster.
Autocracy simply doesn’t work
The grand generalisation, as I see things, is that autocracy can never serve the people well. Some people dream of a “benign dictatorship”, an all-powerful, all wise, all loving, hands-on god-like figure, but in truth there is no such thing, and never has been. Perhaps Solomon came close by many accounts but according to the Book of Kings (1 Kings 11) even he overstepped the mark, became too conspicuously opulent, and made the Lord sore angry. In any case all that was a long time ago. In practice it is impossible to achieve the kind of power that Trump and Putin have accrued without being utterly self-centred, ruthless, and with a huge sense of their own superiority. These are not the traits of a person prepared to be a servant to us all, or indeed the kind of person who in an ideal world anyone sane would want to be in charge.
Once the ambitious politician or tycoon or indeed the president of the local golf club has risen to the top, things are liable to get even worse, for as the historian and statesman Lord Acton famously observed towards the end of the 19th century –
“Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely”
And for good measure he added:
“Great men are nearly always bad men”
These days there is scientific evidence that this is indeed the case. A whole number of studies reveal measurable behavioural and endocrinological changes as people rise in power. The powerful become more confident of their own abilities – and indeed in extreme cases, they begin to feel that they can do absolutely anything better than anyone else. Trump in his own eyes is a genius, a great military tactician and a great sportsman, able to give Rory McIlroy a run for his money on the golf course (with a little help from his caddies) and to override the decisions of football referees even though he admits on a point of detail that he does not actually know the rules. Indeed, recent studies show that the microarchitecture of the brain changes as people in power find themselves increasingly unopposed. New synapses appear and relevant neurones become more fast-acting. Anatomy in general and indeed the genome are far more responsive to circumstance and to their possessor’s mood and ideas than has traditionally been supposed. There’s an extensive and growing literature on all aspects of this on the web (just type in “neurological changes with power” or some such).
As Anne Applebaum observes, autocrats or would-be autocrats politically are a mixed bag, including “people who call themselves communists, monarchists, nationalists and theocrats”. However they label themselves, once they are in power autocrats of whatever stripe do whatever it takes to suppress or eliminate the opposition: everything from the takeover of the social media to rigged elections to show-trials and imprisonment of so-called “dissidents” to assassination or mass murder, all of which are a familiar thread in modern life.
Governments both of the Far Left and the Far Right seem bound at least to aspire to autocracy and in practice are invariably foul, whether the boss is Stalin or Kim Jong Un, or Franco or Mussolini. They are also very stupid. They hold on to power only by perpetual conflict, and if there is no obvious enemy with which to strike fear into the hearts of the citizenry, autocrats invent one. The favoured scapegoats of the almost-autocrat Trump and the would-be autocrat Farage are immigrants, in both cases identified in large part by the colour of their skin, no matter how much benefit immigrants may bring to their host countries. The favoured enemy of Putin and Xi is capitalism and western decadence, though both of them practice “state capitalism” and Putin is as attached as Trump is to his gold-leafed palaces.
And, I suggest, a world rooted in conflict, with a “neoliberal” economy geared to a no-holds-barred all-out scrabble for material wealth and dominance, is not simply “unsustainable”, as the fashionable term has it. It is non-viable: incapable of prolonged life; doomed to lurch towards a state of entropy. Right now the world as a whole and a large proportion of all the creatures within it, including human creatures, are heading pell-mell for the Apocalypse, and the political philosophy represented by Trump and Farage, is speeding us on our way. Far Right thinking exacerbates and indeed depends on strife, which means destruction and waste, as is all too visible not least in Gaza and the Left Bank and Ukraine, and in an already crowded but all too obviously finite world, waste and destruction are what we cannot afford. In short, the thinking behind the Far Right policies that are being imposed by Trump and are admired by Farage threatens to kill us all, and has already made considerable inroads. Indeed their ideas and attitudes are the diametric opposite of what the world really needs – if, that is, we seriously care about the plight of humankind, and of the natural world, and about the future: the world that our grandchildren and great grandchildren will inherit.
I suggest, in absolute contrast, that if we seriously give a damn about the state of the world and the future, we need to root all that we do, and all our politics, and the economy, in the idea of harmony: tolerance; cooperation; compassion; synergy; and indeed – another fashionable term, though this time of a positive kind – love. In practice, on the political front, the governance we need must be socialist, democratic, and green. All, however, must be properly construed, which to a large extent they are not. Here, then, is a brief rundown on what each of them entails:
The essential ingredients of appropriate governance
1: Socialism.
Wikipedia (which I regard as one of the great gifts of modern civilization), Meriam-Webster (“America’s most trusted dictionary”), the London-based IEU (Institute of Economic Affairs), and doubtless many more, all describe socialism in economic terms. All suggest that it is “characterised by public ownership of the means of production”.
But, I suggest, all of these august centres of wisdom have got it wrong. Socialism is about concern for society and should be defined primarily in moral terms. In the words of Keir Hardie (1856-1915), generally recognized as the principal founder of Britain’s Labour Party, in From Serfdom to Socialism (1907):
“To the Socialist the community represents a huge family organisation in which the strong should employ their gifts in promoting the weal of all, instead of using their strength for their own personal aggrandizement”
And:
“I claim for socialism that it is the embodiment of Christianity in our industrial system”
I love the following too from Bill Shankly (1913-1981), who managed Liverpool F C though some of its greatest years from the late 1950s to the ‘70s:
“The socialism I believe in is everyone working for each other, everyone having a share of the rewards. It’s the way I see football, the way I see life”
As for the economy, here’s what Aneurin (“Nye”) Bevan (1897-1960) had to say in 1952 his “personal manifesto”, In Place of Fear:
“A mixed economy is what most people of the West prefer. The victory of Socialism need not be universal to be decisive … It is neither prudent, nor does it accord with our conception of the future, that all forms of private property should live under perpetual threat. In almost all types of human society different forms of property have lived side by side”
To be sure, he added:
“But it is a requisite of social stability that one type of property ownership should dominate. In the society of the future it should be public property”
Clearly, though, to Bevan, one of Labour’s greatest spokesmen and the principal driving force behind the NHS, the economy was merely a means to an end – and the end was a harmonious and fair society at ease with itself. John Maynard Keynes (1883-1946), widely acknowledged as one of the greatest economists, did not see himself as a socialist but he would surely have agreed with Bevan’s priorities. In a well-tempered society, said Keynes:
“ … the economic problem will take the back seat where it belongs … and the arena of heart and head will be occupied where it belongs, or reoccupied by our real problems, the problems of life and human relations, of creation, and of behaviour and religion”
Quoted by Archie Mackenzie in Faith in Diplomacy, Caux Books, 2002, p 200.
For my part, I am sure that private ownership and free enterprise have a lot going for them – provided they operate within a moral framework that is rooted in compassion and justice. Corner shops and market stalls and small farms (and indeed the “free press”) are products of free enterprise, and all are essential components of an agreeable and viable society. As another world-renowned economist Paul Krugman (b 1953) commented in the New York Times on January 10 2011,
“… welfare-state capitalism — a market economy with its rough edges smoothed by a strong safety net — has produced the most decent societies ever known”
The Keir Hardie / Nye Bevan truly socialist spirit still lives on in Labour. I hope that under Andy Burnham it comes to the fore.
2: The absolute importance of Democracy.Democracy is difficult. Indeed as Churchill (allegedly) commented:
“Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others.”
But for all kinds of reasons both moral and practical, democracy is necessary. For one thing we all feel (do we not?) that in an ideal world we ought to be able to lead our own lives, without some “authority” telling us what to do and what not to do. At least, all who are not psychopaths acknowledge that societies must have rules – carte blanche is for gangsters. But most of us also feel that we ought to have some say in how the rules are framed, or at least have some say in deciding who actually does make the rules. In the opening words of the American Declaration of Independence, dated July 4 1776:
“Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of those ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or abolish it, and to institute new Government…”
These sentiments arise in part from the argument that Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) put forward in Leviathan, in 1651, that although leaders or indeed rulers may be necessary, no-one should be allowed to lead and still less to rule without the consent of the ruled; that the relationship between the rulers and the ruled should be one of contract. I would like simply to suggest too that many heads are better than one: that true democracies by definition should draw on the thoughts and feelings and abilities of everyone, so everyone ought to have a fair chance to say their piece. The suppression of women through much of history and in the modern world has been and is at the very least a shocking waste of talent and potentially of wisdom, the most precious quality of all.
Of course, like all big ideas, the idea of democracy is always likely to be corrupted. Above all, democracy tends to be confused with populism. Populists like Trump and Farage merely seize upon some general discontent (the cost of living, the cost of houses, immigrants, etc) and promise do to do something about it. They don’t want people at large to think. Indeed they depend on people not knowing, and not thinking things through, and voting on the basis of their stirred-up anger. This is not democracy. It is mob rule. In true democracies all citizens are enjoined to take a serious interest in their own society’s and in the world’s affairs and to take part in making the decisions that affect us all. Indeed this is seen as a public duty. All of which led to Oscar Wilde’s complaint, that
“Democracy takes up too many evenings”
— which alas is true and largely explains why most of us most of the time prefer to leave the burden of leadership and admin to others.
The practicalities are difficult too. It is easy for powerful governments to rig elections; and when they are not rigged the would-be autocratic losers claim that they have been, as noisily demonstrated by Trump, who seems in so many ways to encapsulate all that is wrong with politics. We need too to embrace more fully the idea of subsidiarity, which says that political decisions should be taken as close to the grassroots as possible; that governments should not micromanage as, for example, Michael Gove sought to micromanage education. The idea evidently arose with the Catholic Church, not necessarily through any great democratic urge but as a way of easing the burdens of the Pope. Devolution helps too, including Andy Burnham’s proposed Manchesterism. The Ancient Greeks also introduced sortition, meaning that a part of government was created like a jury – by selecting people almost at random, charged with making decisions that affect us all. It was seen as a citizen’s duty to serve, at least for a time, if selected. It has often been suggested that modern governments should make more use of sortition than they do.
In the end, of course, democracy cannot produce the kind of peaceable societies we need and most of us surely prefer unless people at large are nice: meaning that they really care about the wellbeing of others, both human and non-human. But then, as argued elsewhere on this website (and in my book, Why Genes Are Not Selfish And People Are Nice (Floris, 2012)), by far the majority of people are nice, if not pressured to be otherwise. I don’t get the impression from most of what he says, and does, including his triumphalism and his bursts of temper, that Nigel Farage is nice. And neither, of course, are any of the world’s autocrats or would-be autocrats. They may be affable when it suits them but that’s not the same thing at all. As Hamlet commented (Act I Scene 2)
“One may smile and smile and be a villain”
3: What it means to be truly Green. As I see things, to be truly Green is to feel that all life is sacred; or as John Ruskin famously remarked in Unto This Last (1860):
“There is no wealth but life”
It requires us to embrace James Lovelock’s concept of Gaia: that the Earth as a whole has many of the qualities that are characteristic of living organisms, including or especially the quality of homeostasis: the ability to maintain fairly constant and equable conditions – conditions conducive to life – in the face of a hostile cosmos. Lovelock did not suggest that the Earth is itself a living organism. But he did suggest that it is at least reasonable to regard and nurture the Earth as if it is a living organism.
More broadly still, being truly Green requires us to embrace the “bedrock” moral/ metaphysical principle of Oneness: the feeling that all human beings and indeed all of Life are one. The concept of Oneness does not require us to value all living creatures equally. It would surely be absurd to attach as much value to the life of an ant as to a human baby, as some have sometimes come close to suggesting we should. To be sure, as the 17th century Herefordshire poet and cleric Thomas Traherne observed
“An ant is a great miracle in a little room and no less a monument of eternal love than almighty power”
By the same token, human beings are a great miracle too. Both indeed should be regarded as miracles of Creation, and/or as pinnacles of evolution, and the value of each should therefore be seen to be infinite. But not all infinities are equal. For example there is an infinite number of numbers, and an infinite number of even numbers, but there are obviously more numbers than there are even numbers. Likewise, individual ants may be seen to be of infinite value but the value of individual human beings is even more infinite. Or to misquote Napoleon the autocratic pig George Orwell’s Animal Farm, “All animals are infinite but some are more infinite than others.”
The Eastern religions in general – Hinduism, Buddhism, Sikhism, Jainism, Shintoism – emphasise the idea of Oneness far more than the Abrahamic religions do (Judaism, Christianity, Islam). Religion in general I feel is of vital importance, but I do not feel inclined to hang my hat on any particular religion, and I know that a great many people feel the same. I do like this from the Sufi teacher Ibn Arabi (1165-1240):
“My heart is a pasture for gazelles and a convent for Christian monks; a temple for idols and the pilgrim’s Ka’aba, the tables of the Torah and the book of the Qur’an. I follow the religion of Love. Whatever way Love’s camels take, that is my religion and my faith”
I do not presume to claim as much but I admire the sentiment. So:
Where does all this leave Farage v Binface?
I have not studied the life and works of Count Binface in depth but he seems to be making a point that first occurred to me about 70 years ago: that although there have been and are many fine politicians, politicians in general tend to be pompous, and take themselves far too seriously. More recently as I have suggested on this website I have begun to feel that politics as a whole is to a large extent a trivial pursuit, which rarely engages seriously with the real problems of the world, and when it does, generally fails to put the best ideas into action, although this is what governments and politicians are supposed to be for. Politics in practice is primarily a power game, an attempt to impose the ideology of the one or other political party on the rest of us. But ideologies in general are too simplistic. Certainly, no existing ideology – or none at least that is on offer – has the breadth, depth, and subtlety required to tackle the vast and interwoven problems of the modern world. When ideologies are reduced to slogans and economics is reduced to algorithms the gap between what is needed and what is on offer becomes even wider.
No matter how much he pretends otherwise, Farage in practice represents the worst of politics – politics as nothing but self-advancement and power-struggle. The main political parties are quite right to dismiss the August 13 by-election in Clacton as a stunt, and to give it a wide berth. And Count Binface is right to suggest, by campaigning with a dustbin on his head, that although there are some good politicians with good ideas, politics as a whole as generally construed and practiced is deeply flawed. Like everything else, it needs re-thinking from first principles. Renaissance, in fact.
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