Understanding the Present, Part I
The chaos of the last four year years has made all the uncertainties of a postmodern age manifest in political incoherence. Current events pile up in meaningless disjunction while partisan media construct alternate universes of invective in an Orwellian perversion of the English language. The confusion gives new life to Thomas Jefferson’s assertion that, “the man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who reads only newspapers.”
As the artisans of information overload ply their trade, only a withdrawal from the FOMO machine of the 24/7 infotainment cycle can lead to understanding. What is needed is not some new and more complete list of facts – it is a new way to make sense of what is known. Two sophisticated 21st-century thinkers offer a way out.
Though F.A. Hayek and Rene Girard occupy different corners of the humanities, both had the misfortune of articulating cyber-age social theory in a 20th century that was not quite ready for them. Girard’s oeuvre is a heady blend of philosophical anthropology, literature, and religious studies, while Hayek’s straddles political economy and theory of mind. As academia finally begins to tear down disciplinary silos, their ideas are starting to sound prophetic.
Hayek’s celebrated Road to Serfdom took shape in the heat of WWII when the Austrian economist was denied admission into the British armed forces. It was written as his ‘war effort;’ an attempt to warn the English-speaking world of the ideas that had transformed once-democratic Germany into a totalitarian monster. Hayek’s writing is especially poignant because he describes the experience of “living twice through the same period.” In 1945, it looked more than likely that free societies would not survive.
The Road to Serfdom uncovers the ideas that lead democracies towards fascism. When free people in democratic societies look to government as a source of welfare, they empower it to take resources and apply them to special projects. Yet the question emerges: which projects should be funded? Which needs, of what people, should be given priority? There is no way to resolve these question objectively, for there is no scientific method available to determine what is most important in a pluralistic society. This, like so much else, is a matter of personal value judgment.
A government that is tasked with the challenge of allocating resources on the basis of value judgments must necessarily choose between competing sets of values. This means that no matter what the State does, it will violate the wishes of many of its citizens while elevating the preferences of one group over all others. Then, it will tax everyone in order to pursue the value judgments of the dominant group. This transforms citizenship from membership in a shared project into competition for a limited supply of State goods and services. However, once the government is expected to improve the welfare of its citizens with special projects, it cannot wait for scientifically valid arguments – it has no choice but to act.
This imperative is fraught with risk. Henry David Thoreau observed that the reason why majorities rule in democracy, “is not because they are most likely to be in the right, nor because this seems fairest to the minority, but because they are physically the strongest.” The mythology of democratic elections lends a veneer of justice to what is always and everywhere an expression of power. When the majority becomes accustomed to ignoring the values of the minority, there is little standing in the way of tyranny.
Moreover, disagreements over value are annoying obstacles to majorities that expect their government to act swiftly in order to improve life for the average citizen. Democracy itself can seem like an unnecessary formality in the face of perceived injustice – particularly in a time of crisis. The mismatch between the public’s desire for effective intervention and the legislature’s (in)ability to evaluate competing value systems leads only to frustration. Thus, societies in which the government is expected to relieve suffering are societies in which deadlock is endemic.
It only takes a cursory glance at contemporary politics to reveal the accuracy of Hayek’s account. Presidents no longer “wait for Congress to act,” as Obama put it, before signing executive orders to address novel ‘national emergencies.’ Meanwhile, newspapers excoriate the ‘logjams’ in Congress, which has been asked to do the impossible. Representatives and Senators from a nation of 350 million people must somehow agree about the ‘rational’ way to spend trillions of dollars, and when they inevitably fail to do so, they are castigated for an inability to ‘compromise.’
A similar disdain for democratic officials spread throughout Germany in the 1930s. After traditional parties failed to live up to the public’s demand for decisive action, a strong leader emerged to set things straight. A representative of “the people,” he launched tirades against the businessmen and the moneychangers, promising to instantiate a new order. His tactics are becoming fashionable once again.
Given the unpalatable nature of Hayek’s diagnosis, it is worth considering exactly what sort of account he offers. Clearly, The Road to Serfdom does not ‘prove’ that the United States is on the verge of totalitarianism. In fact, no one ever could prove such a thing. Contrary to the claims of Marx, there is no scientific way to predict the course of history. All the statistical analyses in the world could not deliver the sort of certainty that physicists have when they calculate the course of a rocket. In social affairs, prediction is just another form of prophecy.
What, then, is the meaning of the parallels between The Road to Serfdom and the present day? If social science cannot ever ‘prove’ anything about the world, then what is its use? Hayek’s theory is not a mathematical exposition, but the fact that it maps onto current events is significant. It indicates that The Road to Serfdom is an integral aid to understanding – it serves as a picture of the present.
The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein uses the term ‘picture’ to describe the relationship between thoughts and the world they describe in his rather clumsily entitled Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. He argues that thoughts represent the world when the connections between words correspond to the connections between things in the world. Similarly, a painting of a landscape represents the landscape when the elements of the painting have the same relationship between one another as the elements of the landscape have with each other. The representation is perfect when it is possible to ‘translate’ from one to the other. Thus, sheet music is a ‘picture’ of the composition, because one can translate notation into a melody.
Interestingly enough, Hayek relies on a picture theory to explain the mysterious connection between the physical impulses of brain neurons and mental experience. In The Sensory Order, he argues that the neurons of the brain form internal relationships analogous to the relationships linking events in the physical world. Thus, the brain represents the world by analogy, and the mind is the experience of that analogy. When the internal relationships of the mind correspond to the relationships that hold between external events, the mind is what Hayek calls a ‘map’ of the world. This is, once again, a picture theory – one that has proved indispensable to the development of cognitive science.
This excursion into the picture theory should indicate that there is a basis for drawing conclusions from parallels between social theory and current events. The Road to Serfdom may not provide a formula with predictive power, but it does offer a coherent way to understand today’s conflicts. The fact that it maps onto the present is significant, and deeply concerning.
Yet while The Road to Serfdom addresses the ideological origins of contemporary rivalry, there is much that it does not comprehend. The crisis at hand is by no means limited to the political and economic sphere – it is profoundly personal. This is not (just) an age of State censorship, propaganda, and violence. It is an era of self-censorship, delusion, and revolt. It is the individual manifestations of rivalry that make it so pervasive, and so unsettling. These will be taken up in next week’s newsletter on the work of Rene Girard.