{"id":83047,"date":"2012-09-01T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2012-09-01T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/newcriterion.com\/article\/a-dislocated-society\/"},"modified":"2024-03-26T14:16:56","modified_gmt":"2024-03-26T18:16:56","slug":"a-dislocated-society","status":"publish","type":"article","link":"https:\/\/newcriterion.com\/article\/a-dislocated-society\/","title":{"rendered":"A dislocated society?"},"content":{"rendered":"

T<\/font>he Greeks\u2014that is to say, Plato and Aristotle\u2014knew that democracy was a bad idea because it would allow the poor to plunder the rich. Modern democracy, however, has been a great success, even though a certain amount of plundering of the rich does go on. The reason is that democracy in Europe has been superimposed on the established constitutions of modern states. As a result, Government of the people (which is meaningless) becomes government by a balance between different groups. If one or other of these groups comes to seem dominant, then democracy begins to look rather like a concealed oligarchy. This is why the standard criticism of modern democracies has been to reveal them as concealing oligarchy.<\/p>\n

Marxism is the classic version of this template, and later, Italians such as Michels and Pareto turned it into a kind of realism about democratic realities. James Burnham\u2019s discovery that the bourgeoisie were being superseded by a managerial class was a notable contribution to this literature. Ferdinand Mount\u2019s The New Few<\/i> is a brilliant deployment of this theoretical device as a way of understanding what is wrong with Britain today, and (in some degree) with other Western states.<\/p>\n

Mount is not only the smartest commentator on British politics, but also its most literate. Instead of grinding partisanship, we have a witty analysis of the piecemeal realities we all too seldom understand as revealing a fundamental change in our condition. Mount takes for granted that a kind of democratic equality is our basic social condition, and asks how Britain has now come to be dominated by a new class of vastly overpaid managers surfacing in commerce, politics, and administration. The archetypal oligarchs are the Russians, but it is the Western bankers accorded astronomical bonuses that are exhibit A in Mount\u2019s argument, partly because their devious irresponsibility rests so evidently on illusion about their powers. The skills they reputedly command are the most immediate causes of our current economic travails. As managers, they have become a closed elite, circulating from board to board, and establishing in one role the set of rules from which they will so spectacularly benefit in the next.<\/p>\n

Mount is, however, concerned with a wider problem, of which oligarchy is merely the most conspicuous outcome. He is one of a set of recent conservative writers who have taken up socialist themes\u2014in his case, the rising gap between the rewards of the rich and of the poor. The bonus world of legislators, bureaucrats, and bankers is part of a process of centralization that explains the alienation of many people from politics in general, and of the unskilled poor even from society itself. Electoral turnouts have been falling, and the recent looting in British cities illustrates another side of the same alienation. Both the abundance of the bonus classes and the poverty of the unskilled have the effect of creating \u201ca dislocated society\u201d in which both oligarchs and unskilled have been disconnected from society at large.<\/p>\n

In the actual conduct of politics itself, power in Britain has moved away from the members of the House of Commons to the Cabinet, and then at one point from the Cabinet to the \u201csofa government\u201d of Tony Blair and his advisers. As part of the same development, the conferences of the political parties became tediously stage-managed, and constituents\u2019 autonomy in selecting candidates has been replaced by centralized demands about the type of candidate who should be chosen\u2014all-women short lists, for example. Politics has lost the excitement of unpredictability because conviction has been replaced by attention to polling and a passion among the leaders to remain in the center ground. Mount thinks the new coalition government in Britain is an improvement. I rather doubt it.<\/p>\n

Mount is very clear that the enfeeblement of the House of Commons results in large measure from the increasing power of the European Union; he might have added the United Nations and the European Court of Human Rights as further eroding national autonomy. Yet the collapse of morale in the Commons follows directly, it seems to me, from the fact that MP<\/span>s are now hollow creatures, reduced in many areas to nodding through EU<\/span> regulation, and concealing their diminished importance by a frenzy of complex legislation aimed at transforming the \u201cculture\u201d of the country. He is certainly eloquent in pointing to the multiplication of laws and their impenetrable complexity as part of what sustains oligarchic power.<\/p>\n

A<\/font>t the heart of the problem of oligarchy lies the moral corruption of the bonus. Professionals in the past were paid salaries and not wages, and adhered to fairly strict codes of propriety. That system has collapsed in recent times because managers have taken to believing that it is good to \u201cincentivize\u201d people to induce them to perform their duties. Down the social scale in Britain, pupils have been paid to stay on at school till they are eighteen years old, and obese women bribed to consult their doctors. In some areas, policemen turn up to wake school truants and get them off to school. To the objection that incentivizing duties corrupts the moral life, the hideous reply is: \u201cBut it works.\u201d The same corrupt \u201cincentivizing\u201d has spread into banking itself as a parody of the free market system of payment by results. The current financial crisis has emerged from this world, and as Mount wryly notes, there has been no \u201crepentance\u201d about the consequences.<\/p>\n

Mount is not concerned with blame, but thinks that politicians can only think of one thing at a time, and, hence, that perfectly sensible policies promoted by Thatcher, Clinton, and others have combined to produce unintended results. Certainly familiar features of the way politicians instinctively react explain a great deal. There are few problems in politics that cannot, in principle, be solved if politicians had more power. That is why they are so keen on the stuff. This particular comedy is now being played out on the big screen in Brussels, where an incompetent bureaucracy created the monetary union of the Eurozone, and thinks that the appalling consequences can be solved by according these same incompetents vastly greater powers to determine the budgets of national states. As the stand-up comedians say, \u201cYa gotta laugh.\u201d<\/p>\n

British MP<\/span>s are helpless in the face of the EU<\/span> because its laws can hardly be repealed\u2014indeed, new entrants are bound hand and foot by the acquis communautaire<\/i>, the entire legal structure enacted up to date. When historically European states last faced this kind of legal paralysis, which was at the end of the middle ages, they solved it by inventing national sovereignty. They learned to practice fluently the skill of legislating and repealing according to political and constitutional needs. It is precisely this national sovereignty that the EU<\/span> seeks to destroy. The Eurocrats want such power to be transferred in its entirety to Brussels. Such a development would, of course, be vastly more disruptive to the British than to the other states of Europe because of the different legal and administrative traditions that have developed since Napoleonic times. British membership in the EU<\/span> is, for this and other reasons, a very hot topic at the moment. But this is one issue (the level of immigration is another) that has long been excluded from respectable discussion by the one oligarchy Mount does not discuss. This oligarchy is composed of respectable elite opinion, marked by a faith in salvation by international bodies, along with contempt for popular opinion and the expression of national interests.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s no doubt that Mount is dealing with important problems which are going to continue to haunt us. The problem is that his solutions at times come close to replicating the problem itself. He favors centralized guidance of commercial reward by a determinate proportion that limits the rewards of managers to some multiple of what is paid on the shop floor. Mount suggests that perhaps a Code of Stewardship mandating some such ideal or limiting proportion would encourage supervisory boards to mitigate the \u201charebrained hubris\u201d of the bonus-crazed top executives. The only real solution, however, lies with a return to sanity\u2014and indeed courage\u2014among shareholders, for other schemes are likely to become entangled with the whole apparatus of business ethics which often aims to subordinate commercial enterprise to what politicians take to be the general 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