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Politics:  additional supplementary material for BETWEEN US AND THINGS

Between Us and Things

E. N. Anderson

Supplementary Online Material:  Politics

General Considerations

1.  Politics and Power

“Politics” has been defined as “who gets what, how, when.”  This seems more like economics than like most people’s understanding of “politics.”  In any case, politics is about cooperation and defense as well as about competition over resources.  Aristotle defined politics as regulation of the public side of life, as opposed to ethics, which, for him, was the regulation of the personal side.

We may provisionally use “politics” to refer to the rules of society and the negotiation, competition, and practice that lead to institutionalization of particular rules.

Politics is variously defined as the result of competition for power or as the way society manages itself and organizes to deal with problems and opportunities.  The latter predicts more accurately the actual working of political systems.

Either way, politics is about power; it is the specific social macroinstitution that manages power over people.  This, however, begs the question of what “power” is.  We loosely use the word in English to refer to brute force, persuasion, charisma, manipulative spending of money, sex appeal, and all sorts of other things that give Person A an edge over Person B.  How comparable is the power of Genghis Khan and his army with the power of an advertisement for Napa Valley wine?  How comparable is the power of a sumo wrestler with the power of a girl using perfume to attract a boyfriend?  Obviously, any analysis of human behavior that treats “power” as a single, simple thing is going to be hopelessly wrong.

This deconstructs the Nietzschean concept of a “drive for power.”  Of course people want control over their lives, and that sometimes means having influence over the lives of people close to them.  But the girl’s drive to get the boy to notice her is extremely different from Genghis Khan’s drive to conquer the world.  Nietzscheans write as if all desire to influence others were of the Genghis Khan sort.  Some, including Nietzsche himself, idealize that.  Others, notably Michel Foucault, abominate it.  Foucault was a genuine philosphical anarchist, one of the last, and for him the world’s problem was the Nietzschean power drive.  He took it for granted and lived only to find ways to block it.

In fact, most people do not want to be Genghis Khan.  The vast majority of human power plays are more like the girl’s.  We want to persuade people around us to notice us in a favorable way.  We may, further, want them to do things for us, and we know that persuading them or giving them fair return is a far more effective way to accomplish this than is brute force.  Even when we want to get rid of them, we are aware that killing them is at best difficult and dangerous and at worst downright illegal, so we find ways to avoid them, instead.

People most certainly want social place.  The greatest human desire, in fact, is to have a secure place in a supportive community.  Lack of this is scary, producing great anxiety.  People inevitably compete for good places, and this can get serious and bitter if the good places are few and hard-to-reach.  (Genghis Khan’s ambition to be world emperor is the limiting case here.)  A confounding variable here, however, is that people simply enjoy competition for its own sake, whether in chess or in racing or in basketball.  Usually they do not think anything serious about it.  “It’s just a game,” and does not make for anger unless someone cheats or unless there is a lot of money and attention riding on the victory.  Even then, sportsmanship generally takes over.  When people get really and massively bitter over competition, as they do in politics, one can be sure that the real concern is social place—security over one’s place, or desire for one that is better and harder to reach.  The search for social place thus leads people to deploy all their wiles, from army tactics in the search for world rule to persuasive verbiage and pictures in the wine advertisement.

This makes the Nietzsche-Foucault position less than tenable.  Brute force is not the commonest or most effective form of power.  One may condemn, with Foucault, the oppressive and cruel forms of power without condemning all attempts by one person to influence another.  In fact, Foucault certainly used his full persuasive power to influence people.  He would answer that he was opposing institutionalized power, not all interpersonal influence.  He does not, however, resolve the problem of determining where the one starts and the other stops.

On the other hand, Foucault can also define power structurally, in a far more believable way:  “Power is not a substance.  Neither is it a mysterious property whose origin must be delved into.  Power is only a certain type of relation between individuals….  The characteristic feature of power is that some men can more or less entirely determine other men’s conduct…. [but] there is no power without potential refusal or revolt”  (Foucault 2006).  The question is whether people have a drive to achieve such dictatorial force over others.  Probably most parents want it over their young children, but otherwise most people simply do not want this (in the extreme form of entirely determining others’ conduct).  Wanting it is clearly pathological in humans.

Power is most directly exerted by brute force, but in actual social life force is rarely used for the purpose.  For one thing, the victim fights back.  For another, leaders must usually rely on soldiers, police or the like to do the forcing, and soldiers are not always loyal; in fact, historically, changes of government are probably more often from military coups than from any other cause.  One has to do something to insure their loyalty, and an endless regress of police forces does not do the job.  Thus leaders rely on loyalty, created by various means.  Leaders also rely on laws, but this too rrequires both enforcement mechanisms and some degree of credibility in the laws.  Laws that are not respected are broken so often that no amount of enforcement works; this happened with the 55-mile speed limit, with litter laws in many areas, and with “blue laws” in most places that have them.

Leaders also deploy persuasion and charisma, and try to use blandishments to make their followers loyal.  Most common of all, however, is power through manipulation of reciprocity and exchange.  Leaders provide services and stabilize and protect markets.  Their subjects or citizens are grateful for the services and depend on the markets.  In everyday life, people work constantly to maintain webs of mutual favors.  This sort of wide-flung reciprocity is the real cement of society—in fact, one could almost say it is society.

Finally, people seem programmed, biologically or by sheer habit, to respect social leaders and institutions.  They follow laws and customs without thinking, just because those are the laws and customs.  The usual rationalization is:  What if everybody just did as they please?  Some dreadful chaos would ensue.  The easiest path is to follow the general rules.  When in Rome, do as the Romans do.  David Hume fell back on this mindless convenience as the only real reason to follow any customs or believe even the most obvious and straightforward things.  Might as well call a dog a dog in England and a chien in France.  And maybe somewhere else it wouldn’t even look like a dog; maybe seeing a “dog” is merely a convention.

In any case, people get amazingly attached to their rules, perhaps especially to the most irrational and unprovable ones.  This gives rulemakers and custom-setters amazing power.  Whoever starts a teenage fad has millions of young people at her command.  The mindless adulation of “celebrities” is similar.  Movie stars have striking power over people’s minds, for no better reason than that everybody knows who they are.

Politics is about defining groups, and making some salient at the expense of others.  It is about organizing morality, and practicing it via laws and administration of justice (or injustice, as the case may be).  It is about organizing society for defense against external and internal enemies.  It is about organizing the economy, the communications network, and even the arts.  In short, it is about keeping society running smoothly enough to accomplish necessary social tasks.
Since getting people to agree on a course of action is, notoriously, “like herding cats,” this is not an easy job.  Shirking, irresponsibility, foot-dragging, and outright betrayal are inevitable, and politicians have to keep these at a bearable level.
Anyone jockeying for power, or trying to use power, has to pay at least lip service to these social goals.  I have known sociopathic politicians who were quite open about being in it for money or power, but they knew they had to deliver the goods, at least to those who had bribed them.  “An honest politician is one that stays bought,” and corrupt politicians learn quickly.
This has led to the vulgar materialist belief that politics is simply economic greed.  However, economics does not explain politics.  Politicians invoke too many things that are clearly irrational in economic terms:  ill-considered wars (Tuchman 1984), genocide, megalomaniac projects like big dams and new capital cities.  Political choice and public choice theorists assume that personal political power is the end for which politicians work.  These theories have an even less impressive prediction record than the economic theories.
Marx saw politics as produced by class struggle, itself the product of tensions between those who controlled the means of production and those who worked for said controllers.  Ultimately, economics—specifically, the means of producing basic subsistence goods, and above all the control of those means—determined the power system.  Capitalists, and capitalist-world theorists, may not go with “class struggle,” but they agree that material goods, producing them, and jockeying for control of them are determinative—the real wellsprings of politics.
This leads the thoughtful social scientist to another observation on rationality.  To Mancur Olson’s cynicism about the possibility of avoiding the destruction of collective institutions by free riders (Olson 1965), we can oppose an even more incontrovertible principle: if, in a world of Olsonian individuals, two “irrational” people band together, they can take over the world in short order.  They can simply conquer all the “rational” individuals, one by one.  In practice, of course, “rational” individuals would flock to join the two.  Even when many of those “rational” individuals fell away to free-ride, a nucleus of less “rational” retainers would surely remain.  They could force others to join them, even on highly prejudicial terms, since it would be so obvious that individual holdouts could not prevail against a united force.  Something very much like this occurred when Genghis Khan united the warring Mongol tribes into a world-conquering strike force (Ratchnevsky 1991).  Olsonian rationality broke the empire down again eventually, but the Mongols managed to rule most of the known world for a number of generations.
Solidarity, then, always wins over rational individualism.  Only a highly committed, ideologically dedicated force can overcome another committed and united force.  If Olson’s definition of “rationality” is used, society will always be ruled by the “irrational.”
We can rely on such irrationality maintaining itself, because parents (even rational ones) usually train their children to be “irrationally” helpful, supportive, and altruistic, at least toward said parents!  Indeed, to function in society, parents have to train children to provide at least the appearance of helpful altruism toward the community at large.
In the modern world, where Olsonian rationality has become something of a self-fulfilling prophecy, environmentalists and any other dedicated individuals have one reason to hope: they can prevail if even a few of them can act as a united force.
Most politicians have powerful ideological commitments and group biases, and are frequently more apt to work against their ideological and ethnic enemies than to work for any personal goal.  The “public choice” theories, in contrast, assume politicians work solely for their own personal power.  This body of theory specifically equates the political behavior of Gandhi and Stalin, Lincoln and Hitler, reducing all to mere power jockeying.  Obviously, such a theory may have its uses, but does not really apply to real-world considerations.  We must specify somewhat more about the actual means and ends of human action.  Surely, people work for power, but power is ability to do something.
Max Weber developed the serious social theory of power.  He defined power as individuals’ ability to “realize their own will…even over the resistance of others.”  Power is the ability to make people do what they don’t want to do.
Further theorizing about power added more radical dimensions, via such writers as Antonio Gramsci, Michel Foucault, Pierre Bourdieu, and their many followers.  Foucault’s starter definition is more dour than Weber’s, as befits Foucault’s anarchist leanings:  “power is essentially that which represses” (Foucault 1980:89-90).  Foucault does, however, admit that power can also produce goods and help people achieve goals.
In politics, “power” means the ability to accomplish something—defend the country, take people’s land, raise more food, enforce the law, or save scarce resources.  We are talking about society’s power over things and over institutions, as well as individuals’ power over each other.  People want control over their lives, and over enough of the rest of their world to provide them with security.  They use any means at their disposal to insure this.  The result is “power,” in some general sense.
Mao Zidong said “power grows from the barrel of a gun,” but also that “one spark can start a prairie fire”—the spark in this case being a call to action, not a gunshot.  I prefer to separate, analytically, a persuasive tongue from a semiautomatic rifle.  Each can sometimes command the other, but they are not the same.
Brute force is the most obvious and undeniable sort of power.  The only way you can really force people to do what they don’t want is to force them by brute strength.  Traditional warfare worked this way.  Soldiers raped, murdered, seized captives.  Today, street gangs and prisons use this kind of power.
However, one cannot really make people do anything positive or constructive this way.  Slaves can always run away, resist, or die.  To make them work, slavers have to make the punishments so horrific that even the worst work is preferable; John Stedman (1988 [1806-1813]) gave the classic account of this.
Much more usual is the sort of coercion immortalized in the Latin American drug dealers’ phrase plata o plomo, “silver or lead.”  Druglords corrupt officials by offering them a choice of a great deal of money (silver) or a lead slug in the head.  This is a convincing argument, but a surprising number of officials resist, and risk their lives. Genghis Khan’s Mongol hordes used the same technique on a massive scale:  join us and fight and get lots of loot, or resist us and die.  Slightly more subtle versions of the same argument are found in corporations that promote the cooperative and fire the uncooperative.  The plata o plomo method, however, is expensive and risky.  It depends on a loyal, cohesive institution—a drug gang, horde, or corporation that can accumulate not only force, but also wealth, and deploy these systematically.
Politicians have to find cheaper ways.  Fortunately, human sociability allows them to succeed in this.  If they can persuade or cajole their followers into acting, the unified group can accomplish a great deal.  If leaders can take advantage of institutions or simply of habits, they can get followers to act even without much persuading or cajoling.  Setting up such institutions is one main function of politics.
Therefore, the commonest and most effective way to exercise power is by social pressure.  Threats of disrespect and ostracization and promises of respect and honor animate suicide bombers, even though their moment of honor is short-lived indeed.  Soldiers on suicide missions, persons who kill themselves for honor or shame, and persons who devote their whole lives to a cause also work for motives stronger than deadly force.  Routinely, people die rather than face humiliation.
Shunning and ostracism to discipline the unsocial is probably by far the most common method of asserting power, worldwide, and in many societies it is about the only way of enforcing the rules.  Simple kin-level societies usually have no other recourse.  Neither do informal groups and children’s play-packs in complex societies.  Yet, since humans are so compulsively social, ostracism remains the most terrifying threat and the most effective way of disciplining people.  In some societies it means death—an Inuit exiled from the group has no chance—but even when it means nothing but inconvenience, it is a terrifying threat.  Conversely, of course, praise and acceptance are powerful motivators, and the power to praise is real power.  Good words from much-higher-status people are important everywhere.
Power can be the ability to call up legitimate force; this is the classic definition of the state, or of its ruling class.  It can also be the ability to call up illegitimate force; this is the imperium in imperio, the capomafiosi equivalent of the state.  It can be simply a function of hierarchic position, in societies where hierarchies are so entrenched that people willingly act (violently if necessary) to maintain hierarchic privilege.  Most societies are so organized.  Power of this sort grades off into mere social status, and this can range from the truly high status of a divine king to the precarious status of a low-ranking male in a patriarchal society.
This makes it more difficult to separate the persuasive tongue from the rifle.  The tongue may be the more dangerous, from the point of view of the victim.
The differentiation of force and persuasion is a false dichotomy, following from the even more false separation of body and mind (Lyons 2005 provides a wonderful discussion of this, crediting Timothy Mitchell for the original insight).  A whole continuum from brute force to silver tongue exists, and the two are not infrequently combined in the same person, each reinforcing the other.  In any case, a silver-tongued orator can exert an almost hypnotic power on people.
However, more important are the phenomena of the middle ground—the ground that the body-mind dichotomy erases.  As Weber pointed out, if people see power is “legitimate,” they will do what is expected of them.  They may have actually agreed to a Hobbesian social contract, but more likely they were raised in a society ruled by law, and accept it or see no good alternatives to it.  If they accept it solely through coercion and fear, we are back with power through brute force, and all its limitations.  Everyone will resist and foot-drag whenever they can (Scott 1985), and rebel the minute they get a chance.  However, most people in most societies see their formal and informal legal codes as legitimate enough to be worth following most of the time.
Michel Foucault is particularly identified with another kind of power, long recognized but not well explored before Foucault’s day (see e.g. Foucault 1965, 1980).  This is the power to define knowledge and set the terms of debate on it.  Societies, especially their ruling elites, decide what is “knowledge,” what is “truth,” what is “important,” what is “salient,” what is “valuable,” what is “debatable” versus what is settled or outside debate.  Foucault differentiates actual truth (hopefully reachable, via independent, critical research) from imposed or official “truths”—what we now call “truthiness” in the United States.
When the king makes the subject swear by divine kingship, or when the rich convince the poor that riches are divine gifts while poverty is divine punishment, the motivations are crudely obvious, and were pointed out long before Foucault.  When America’s ruling elites, under George W. Bush, decide that industry’s freedom to pollute the environment is true freedom, but freedom to vote and speak one’s conscience are trivial and dispensable,  the motives are again clear.  Foucault showed that more subtle “power-knowledge” is commoner and probably more pernicious:  sexual disciplines, beliefs about “crime” and techniques for managing it, even the very classification systems for plants and animals (Foucault 1970).  Elites have not obviously sold these to the masses, and the masses do not see them as clearly maintaining privilege, but these knowledges often do act to discipline the subjects.  The ordering and bureaucratic behavior and rhetoric of government creates not only civil order but also what Foucault called “governmentality”; it creates subjects by disciplining them at every stage of life.  Every piece of official paper from the birth certificate to the death certificate is an exercise of power (cf. Scott 1998).  People learn to be patriotic, giving their willing consent.  Arun Agrawal has developed the concept of “environmentality” (Agrawal 2005) in parallel:  people in modern states become “environmental subjects,” learning, debating, and following official policies toward the environment.  Of course, “the environment” in this sense is itself a Foucaultian concept; the idea is a social and political construct.  The environment of a plant in the mountains is not the same sort of concept as the policy-defined, law-defined, media-defined thing called “the environment.”
This puts us all in the scary position of wondering how much of our daily beliefs are con jobs propagated by evil elites.  Extreme Foucaultians appear to believe that when we say the sky is blue and water is wet, we merely parrot evil lies propagated by evil conspirators.  Granted that reality is far less sinister, we must still wonder whether less obvious “facts” are really true.  Worse: we must wonder how many of the undeniable facts we know are subtly contexted and foregrounded (or backgrounded) to maintain power systems.  The American media today consign global warming to back-page science sections, while giving the front page to the latest murder or sports win.  This certainly confirms a certain priority ranking as the “proper” one, and it just happens to be a very useful priority ranking to the right-wing elites of the nation.
Actual working knowledge turns out to be a complex accommodation between such imposed “power-knowledge” and the actual needs for usual, factual, grounded knowledge among real-world people who have to do things.
Cultural knowledge develops through a long and almost always untraceable sequence of dialogues, negotiations, and subtle power plays.  Is there a sinister reason behind our tendency to focus on movie stars instead of scrutinizing political leaders?  Do politicians deliberately promote this to keep us from examining them?  And how did our sexual morality change from the puritanical 1950s to the roaring 1990s?  There was no one person or moment that decided it.  Was it a sinister way of increasing elite power, or a liberation therefrom?
Cultural knowledges are always pluralist.  Some accept, some reject.  The king may try to behead anyone who questions divine monarchy, but, as Sancho Panza said, “under my cloak, a fig for the king.”  Deviants from other, more diffuse knowledge systems are legion.  Again, we return to the ultimate need of force or of powerful, immediate social sanctions to maintain power.  But conformity and ostracization do, indeed, operate to make people accede in their own repression.
Money is power, and genuinely coercive if the receiver depends on the money.  However, individual greed gives money far more “power” than it really has.  Many people in this world could do with less money and suffer less abuse accordingly.  Money-grubbers do not so much suffer from power as trap themselves.
Simple respect for position or for a competent or politically able person gives that person some power, but only by consent and on sufferance.  Sociologists contrast deference with actual effective power.  Collins notes:  “The divergence between [deference] and [effective] power is particularly sharp in the case of…women administrative assistants who defer to (usually male) line authority but wield most of the invisible power…in a bureaucratic organization” (Collins 2001:286); I can vouch for that, since I worked down the hall from Randy Collins for years, and know some of the people he is talking about.  He goes on to quote Francis Bacon:  “Men in great place are thrice servants:  servants of the sovereign or state, servants of fame, and servants of business.  So as they have no freedom, neither in their persons, nor in their actions, nor in their times” (Collins 2001:288, quoting Bacon’s writings from 1625).
Charisma—the socially negotiated ability of some people to get the public on their side—is a similar trap.  Nietzsche confused power with heroism; worshiping the romantic hero, he idolized power too.  Yet, few heroes are really powerful (a fact which is a subtheme of the Iliad), and, conversely, the vast majority of genuinely powerful people are merely ordinary weak men and women who happen to be high up in a hierarchy.  A charismatic politician may get elected, but most of the world’s powerful people have worked their way up hierarchies by Machiavellian game-playing, not by charisma or any other personal ability.  Many of them, indeed, are utterly contemptible worms by Nietzschean standards—gray Organization Men rather than Nietzschean Supermen.
It is not surprising that people differ enormously in their desire for power, and in the kind they want.  The majority of us do not want more control than we need.  However, we all know people who live only to push other people around.  The psychological roots of this are usually fairly evident.  These are the people who are compulsively active in politics, and often become the rulers and leaders.  Since at least the days of the ancient Greeks, sages have made the point that this often ensures that society is run by its worst members.  The ancient Greeks already knew, also, that democracy is the only cure for this, but is only a partial cure.
Good leaders are always rare, and require a good society to form them, approve them, allow their “charisma” to flourish, and eventually back them and fight for them.  Most good leaders are rather limited in scope.  Supermen, Nietzschean or otherwise, are a fantasy.  Yet, societies somehow find saviors at the right time.  The United States found Abraham Lincoln in 1860; Britain found or created Winston Churchill in the dark days of the 1930s and 1940s; a riven China was reunited by the amazing genius of the founders of the Sui and Tang Dynasties at the end of the 6^th century AD.
In direct proportion to how hierarchic a society is, and how conservative and repressive the hierarchy is, violent and dishonest souls fight for power.  They often become the majority of the elite.  In societies that are truly top-down hierarchies, the violent and dishonest usually become completely dominant, since ruthless power-gaming is the only real way to success.
Most people remain surprisingly indifferent to the lure of upward mobility, or, if they want upward mobility, they want to get it by other means, from economic entrepreneurship to scholarly expertise.  An extreme Nietzschean drive for power is a rare and derivative trait.  Generally, it turns out to derive from simple bullying.  The power-mad are those who are scared, weak, insecure, and prone to shore up their egos by bullying weaker people or animals.  Aggression—always a response to a threat, not an autonomous inborn need—is marshalled in the service of maintaining dominance among the abject.  Nietzsche got it exactly wrong:  the power-seekers are not the supermen but the frailest.
From the ancient Greeks onward, almost every observer of politics has noted a tendency for most people to look up to leaders more because of style than because of substance.  We adulate those who master rotund rhetoric, or have a grave, parental, in-charge demeanor (whether or not they can deliver).  We look down on would-be leaders who lack such authoritative presentations of self.  The brash, outspoken, and spontaneous do not get far in politics—unless they channel their outspokenness into group hate, in which case they succeed, but by base means.  The meek and retiring do not lead.
In difficult times, people go more directly for leaders who seem strong, as opposed to those who can be perceived as weak or vacillating.  The Bush-Kerry election of 2004 turned on the Republicans’ success at playing the contest that way.  In even worse times, openly violent and destructive leaders are adulated:  Napoleon, Hitler, Stalin.  Fear drives respect.
Another sort of power is an emotional hold over someone.  A million novels remind us that the less loving member of a couple has real power over the more loving one.  And consider shame yet again:  if I can expose someone to public shame, I can blackmail said person.  But by this time were are close to mere persuasive ability, which I personally cannot see as power.  Persuasion, by definition, cannot make people do what they do not want to do.  It can only make them want to do it—if the persuader is really good.  Blandishments, compliments, and flattery are frequently effective, but not coercive.
Many grave authorities on politics give more place to high and noble ideals than do the above passages.  Goals of religion, philosophy, or poetry may indeed motivate a few—perhaps more than are motivated by power-madness.  But the sorry record of humanity proves that most politics is vicious and negative.  We will probably never know the relative importances of all these motives, because of the phenomenon of multiple reasons for action.
So power is a complex thing.  A power-hungry person will try to get several kinds:  formal power to invoke force, informal power to call up still more force, wealth, charisma, emotional hold, blackmail, anything.  One kind is never enough.  Portfolio diversification is valuable in maintaining wealth, but absolutely necessary for maintaining power.
One reason is that these different kinds of power can do different things.  Some people can resist any given type of power, and the types of resistance effective against brute force are obviously different from those effective against hierarchic control of knowledge, and these again differ from resistance to social pressure.  The powerful must cope with all kinds of resistance.  Also, powerless but ambitious individuals who see an elite monopolizing one form of power but not another will naturally gravitate to that other form.  A group lacking status and use of force but not wealth may try to get wealth and use it strategically to get power.  This is what the rise of capitalism was all about.  It is also a strategy classically used by politically weak minorities who are in a position to become urban mercantile successes.
Resistance can be startlingly effective (cf. Scott 1985, 1990, 1998).  If most people do not want to obey a law, no one can enforce it.  The 55-mph speed limit in the United States was a dead letter.  Game and hunting laws in Mexico are strict and would be wonderful if enforced, but I never met a Mexican who knew what they were.  Few even knew they existed.  Anti-drug and anti-corruption laws, all over the world, have limited effect.  The most extreme cases of dead-letter laws are the old “blue laws”; in some places, it was (until very recently) illegal to whistle on Sunday, or hold hands with your spouse in public.  No one even remembered these laws except when local historians brought them up for laughs.  Scott, a good Marxist in his early work, saw power as held by an elite and resistance as the tool of the masses.  Others see hierarchies and networks rather than dialectics.  Once again, a particularly good discussion, with extensive ethnography, is provided by Barry Lyons (2005).  He notes how power can lie at state, regional, community, and family levels, and be hierarchical at each.  Working with Quechua indigenous people in Ecuador, he found that they often saw abusive “white” power as illegitimate and intrusive, but its forms and teachings—politeness, discipline, respect, authority—as necessary or desirable, to be reproduced in more legitimate surroundings, meaning especially the Quechua community itself.  I have heard similar views among the Maya of Mexico.
Again, elites must use different forms of power and persuasion to get around this.  Enough people must be convinced that the laws are worth following and will be enforced.  Usually, a large majority must be so convinced, though a draconian regime can get along with support from local elites and dependents thereof.
In short, power is not easy to understand, nor to gain or hold.  Bourdieu speaks of a “field of power,” which is “a field of forces structurally determined by the state of the relations of power among forms of power, or different forms of capital….The different forms of capital are specific forms of power that are active in one or another of the fields…” (Bourdieu 1998:264-165).  This allows Bourdieu to mix social connections, ideological authority, rhetorical persuasiveness, money, guns, sophistication (“cultural capital”), and anything else he chooses.  He claims he can provide us with rules for converting these currencies; not surprisingly, he doesn’t do any such thing.
However, Bourdieu can, and does, look at political arenas.  The political nexus, rather than Marx’ “money nexus,” is the locus of social action.  Politics is meant here in the broad sense:  direct control of or management of people.  It can be dictatorship by brute force, or people getting together and discussing until they come to a collective decision about managing something, and implementing that decision through some sort of social agency that can act or enforce.
Hobbes wrote of a social contract that establishes peace by instituting autocratic government and securing property.  Hobbes was wrong about the mechanism, including the need for a king, but he was right about the need for an organized social system to guarantee peace.  People may want to do some antisocial things, like snitching Baby Sister’s candy or fighting the neighbors or dumping trash in the river, but they want society more.  They will give up a lot for it.  In fact, as suicide bombers remind us, they will give up their lives for it.
Hobbes is also wrong for the opposite reason.  Setting up a social system does not stop conflicts.  In fact, a sociologist—or an anarchist—would say that, in fact, society creates such things; intolerance and factionalism are social facts, not products of individuals in a state of nature.
So a social contract must do much more than uplift a Hobbesian autocrat.  It must deal not only with basic economics and politics, but with aesthetics, emotions, and indeed total personal involvement in the interactive networks that constitute society-on-the-ground.  Even the rules of language are a part of the social contract.  People contract with each other to talk in a certain way, such that mutual understanding is facilitated.  Schizophrenics and autistic persons break those rules and are, to that extent, outside society.
It has become rather traditional, even among non-Marxists, to analyze society in Marx’ terms:  an economic foundation, concerned with producing and distributing subsistence goods; a social order erected on top of this; and an ideological order that justifies the social order.  Over the long term, and in some aspects of society, this seems to be often true.  However, I am by no means sure that material production is so critical.  Nor do I see that it entails the others.  The ideological system of Islam is astonishingly uniform across societies whose technologies range from the simplest to the most complex.  Moreover, Islam’s main variants (Sunni and Shi’a, the four legal schools of Sunni, and others) have been stable for centuries; few new currents have come with the rise of modern economies.  Conversely, similar modern technological and legal ownership systems flourish widely today, in Islamic lands and Maya and Chinese villages as in New York.  This happens even when ideological “modernization” (in the sense of emulation of American ways) is a cost, not a benefit.  Social systems spread by imitation more than because of real systemic need.  We need more objective studies of this issue.
2.  Politics and Solidarity
Political dealing, not money, makes the world go round; how many misers made history?  In the political arena, the persuasive tongue can beat the rifle.  Pace the proverb, God is not on the side of the heaviest artillery.  Victory goes to the side with more solidarity.  The United States learned this in Vietnam and again in Iraq.  Often, one can assume roughly equal loyalty commitments by rival armies, and then artillery is decisive; but history is full of cases of absurdly lopsided wins by tiny but solidary minorities.  The Greek victories at Marathon and Salamis are famous, but the most extreme cases may be the frequent victories by small nomad forces over huge Chinese armies in old central Asia.
Politics is often about divisiveness, but when it actually creates solidarity, some real things get accomplished.  Ideally, politics should be the art of holding a society together by balancing and accommodating different interests and bringing bearers of those interests to the negotiating table.  A good politician or administrator can persuade these various stakeholders to work together for the common good, bringing all their different skills, abilities, and interests to the task.  More often, keeping them from each others’ throats is a full-time job.
As we would expect, peaceable mutual accommodation is more likely in hopeful times, while increasing trouble or threat leads to increasing fear and conflict.  Culture and social solidarity obviously affect this.  Hopeful politics assumes the best in people.  There is a range here from the extremely idealist to the coldly cynical.  Kropotkin’s anarchism is extreme in one direction; Pyotr Kropotkin assumed that people would be good if only oppression and force were eliminated from their worlds.  This did not work.  At the other extreme is the folk-Hobbesian view of people as simply out for what they can get, and the Nietzschean view of people as violent competitors restrained only by superior force.  If these views were correct, social life could not exist.  People are good and bad, and one has to treat them accordingly.
Time and energy are limited, and the bads need immediate attention or at least top priority.  Caution and care come first.  Thus, the Founding Fathers of the United States were right in leaving people largely free to pursue their “happiness,” and directing government toward assuring enough security to let them do it.  This, in turn, requires the “checks and balances” the Founding Fathers planned—and, today, quite a few new checks and balances, to deal with such things as multinational corporations and organizations.  Bertolt Brecht’s “first feeding, then morality” (erst das Fressen, dann die Moral) can be modified:  First protection, then feeding, then the rest.
This being the case, politics is normally focused heavily on such military and defensive functions.  Until recently, the real task of rulers was war—protecting their subjects and conquering enemies.  Today, that is still the major thrust of politics.  War and armaments are by far the biggest budgetary item for governments worldwide, consuming several orders of magnitude more wealth than feeding the hungry or protecting the environment.  Conflict is the biggest issue for governments.  This may have some biological grounding; perhaps above-the-family social action in early human evolution was largely about organizing for war.
Failing a war, politics tends toward conflict with structural opponents—groups defined as radically different groups within one’s own social universe.  A drawback of civilization is that it allows people to segregate along moral, political, ethnic, and other lines.  Simpler societies have more control and balance; a village contains its saints, who provide balance, and its violent two or three, who can be restrained or sent off to war.  In the modern United States, the violent people of a whole city or state can gather in gangs in one small area.  The saints tend to separate off, retreating into churches or academies or “nice neighborhoods.”  Such societies have lost the flywheel.  They can spin out of control very rapidly if war or natural catastrophe gives the violent gangs a chance to take over.
Closely related is the bloody-minded attitude found in much of politicking.  Many people vote from a nasty, in-your-face antagonism to everyone—big government, big business, neighbors, property owners.  Fights over rights to bear arms, restrictions on personal damages, restrictions on private property, even the most basic and reasonable public health laws, become terribly bitter, with many voters openly voting to hurt others even if they hurt themselves as much or more—as in the case of anti-public-health and anti-environmental campaigns.  Fights over educational policy often pit those who favor actual education over those who favor discipline, dragooning, and indoctrination as the only goal of schooling.
And yet, amazingly, government does succeed in doing some good.  Even the early states of ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia at least protected their people (sometimes) and delivered some water.  Today we have public health campaigns, art museums, street repairs.
The major problems come when a society is truly on a downward cycle.  As people lose hope, and lose trust in government, they are less willing to pay taxes, cooperate with groups they fear, or even vote.  The decline of civic participation and civic feelings in the United States (Putnam 2000), like other ills, tracks the rise of giant, out-of-control, faceless corporations.  Governments become corrupt and lazy.
Given all the above, grave authorities have tried to limit or abolish power since early times.  Most early societies tried to restrain it by tight rules; Islam’s Shari’a rules are the most extensive and specific case, but China’s less extreme “legalistic” philosophies (there were several) developed effective strategies.  Confucians tried to restrain it by moral training of the leaders.  The Taoists, like anarchists from Bakunin to Foucault, tried to abolish power and politics outright.  Over time, many anarchist utopian communities have been founded, but all, unsurprisingly, fell apart.  The Founding Fathers of the United States relied on voting and on balance of powers.  Adam Smith tried to spread power as widely as possible, through economic and moral individualism.  We now try all these measures, and still do not manage the job.
Many, including the Founding Fathers of the United States (especially Thomas Paine), have held that hierarchies make for bad people.  The ancient Greeks already contrasted democracy with tyranny (and saw them evolving into each other), and most of the relevant theory was already being spelled out by Herodotus and Thucydides.  Lord Acton’s Law—”all power tends to corrupt, and absolute power tends to corrupt absolutely”—is one of the most quoted lines on earth, and most people strengthen it by leaving out the “tends to.”  Theoretically, the more top-down, rigid, and power-concentrating a hierarchy is, the more bullying people are at the top, the more craven and treacherous at the bottom.  But, also, bullies in power may not be corrupted by the power; they may have been bullies already.  In many situations, bullies and competitively amoral people are attracted to power games.  So power might not so much corrupt people as attract the already corrupted. Either way, the prudent society will minimize power hierarchies and power disproportions of all kinds.

Conversely, received wisdom teaches that equality produces responsibility and civic virtues.  Once again, the Founding Fathers thought so, and European aristocrats like de Tocqueville rather grudgingly agreed.  This has worked for the United States, but the jury is still out on its worldwide applications.  After all, the Huns, Mongol hordes, and other old-time warrior nomads were a fairly egalitarian lot, at least compared to their enemies.  Open opportunity for peaceful advancement may be (or may have been) more important than equality.

People are constantly reacting against control.  Yet they know they need it: if not a Hobbesian absolute monarchy, at least a Lockean state.  Since no society can survive without some leaders and followers, and since no contemporary society can survive without complex multilayered structures of command, the best we can hope for is constant push for egalitarianism and open opportunity combined with channels of accountability and recourse for the weaker.
3.  Politics and Public Morality
People are variously good or bad, but all require some kind of social morality.  Common experience suggests that it does not win over a society unless it is accepted by 80-90% of the body politic.  This leaves about 10-20% as “criminals,” or at least “immoral.”  Usually, these are the violent, unpredictable persons, or the ones who simply cannot keep faith and be trusted.  In some societies, however, they are the saints—victims of the 80% becoming racist, fascist, or religiously bigoted.  We all know that majority rule does not guarantee the good.
Public campaigns may change morality very strikingly.  When I was young, a good 80% of Americans were litterbugs, and most American adults smoked in public.  Littering dropped dramatically, and later so did public smoking, because of constant public campaigns and some enforcement of laws.  With less enforcement of litter laws but more concern about smoking, littering has climbed again but smoking continues to retreat.
Less serious issues than basic social morality may thrive on a bare majority.  As soon as nonsmokers made up more than 50% of the adult population of the United States, laws began to change, rapidly reversing from always favoring smokers to banning smoking in any enclosed space.  This occurred in spite of the intensive lobbying by the tobacco industry, which was extremely successful for years in blocking legislation or elimination of tobacco subsidies, especially at the federal level.
The need for politics to get at least 50% support for anything, and at least 80% for anything major, stands in dramatic contrast to the situation in ordinary consumership and in arts and sciences, where a very few people can at least preserve their own tastes or findings, and can eventually convince everyone.  Politics requires 50% or more for an idea to survive at all.  In a totalitarian climate, of course, it requires much more.
Some moral campaigns never catch fire.  “Drugs, sex and rock’n'roll” have been the targets of intensive campaigns in the United States and elsewhere, but seem to persist.  Sexual mores have changed dramatically, but in the opposite direction from that advocated by the campaigns.  More and more repressive criminalization of drugs has served to fill the jails, but makes no visible dent in drug abuse rates (as shown by the lack of difference between repressive and tolerant nations).  Rock’n'roll…  Well, only Singapore seems to have succeeded in enforcing strict controls on all three.
Only very rarely can a major moral point begin as a tiny minority view, stay that way for years, and eventually take over.  The most spectacular example in history is the sudden shift away from slavery in the early 19^th century.  The idea that slavery was bad—absolutely morally wrong to the point of requiring abolition—seems not to have existed anywhere in the world until the Quakers and a few other religious figures so concluded in the 18^th century.  They began to convince many others after the revolutions of the 1770s and 1780s.  By the 1820s England had abolished slavery, and the rest of the world followed over the next 60 years.  Slavery survives today in many areas, but at least it is illegal and condemned everywhere, however lax enforcement is in many countries.  Similar campaigns against war, genocide, environmental destruction, corruption, and other evils have not advanced significantly over the decades; indeed, the ancients did as well with these problems as we do.
4.  Politics and the Good
A factor in change and stability is the solidarity of conservatives.  Definitions of “conservative” normally include, in fact center on, the conservatives’ loyalty to their group, its hierarchy, and its mystical central ideas.  Conservatives stand shoulder to shoulder in defense of religious dogma, national symbols, political ideals, and other abstractions.  They normally define themselves through defense of these against all comers, and they thus define themselves further by militance and often by armed violence.  There is a range from moderate, sensible, loyal folk to the reactionary fanatics who become suicide bombers in the defense of a faith they often do not understand.

Liberals, by contrast, are usually defined in terms of individualism.  They are critics, individualists, rebels, or people motivated by rational self-interest.  (Libertarians have recently sorted with conservatives, but should really be liberals, being the heirs of the 19^th-century “liberal” political economists; the reasons they are not “liberal” today are historical and contingent.)

Conservatism often takes a negative view of humanity.  It is, classically, a position for those who think people are innately selfish, greedy, violent, or foolish, and have to be restrained by law.  Pervasive fear comes from, and leads to, this idea of people as basically bad.  However, many conservatives—especially religious ones—strongly disagree.  Religious conservatives with the courage of their convictions see humans as divinely created and protected, made in the image of God, and thus innately good, or at least having good potential.  Conversely, liberalism is supposedly more optimistic about people and about caring, but a surprising number of liberals are cynical, assuming rational self-interest of the narrowest form.

Caring goes with an assumption that people are basically good, or at least worth caring for.  Thus optimistic liberals and religious conservatives are more apt to care than the pessimists on both sides.  On the other hand, pessimists are often frustrated idealists, and these sometimes have very high standards for caring.

This simple opposition of “people are good” and “people are bad” predicts some of political theory.  Those who believe people are bad, from Hobbes to Stalin to Han Feizi, agree that the only sensible form of government is tyranny:  the baddest dude rules the rest through terror.  They may differ on how this is achieved and maintained—from Hobbes’ contract by the ruled, and thus (at least implicitly) consent of the governed, to Stalin’s outright terror.  But they agree on the basics.

Those who think people are not so bad run a range.  At one extreme is Pyotr Kropotkin’s dream that people are so good that they need no government at all.  This is, in some ways, simply a restatement of Jesus’ mission; Jesus hoped that people could so live in love that they would form a communal society where each would help all for sweet love’s sake.  (Ironically, the Christian churches and their kept rulers have been among the most viciously amoral bloodshedders in human history—just like the militant atheists such as Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pol; dogmatic religion is the same whether belief in God or denial of God is the axiom.)  Anarchist regimes, when they have briefly succeeded, have been no better than the rest.  The undeniable success of small-scale societies without formal government is a function of their face-to-face social reality, not of the innate overall goodness Kropotkin dreamed.

Another vision of the good came from humanistic psychology in the mid-20^th century.  We were to be saved by ending sexual repression, being open with one another, and “sharing and caring.”  The resounding failure of even the mildest forms of this vision have been extremely sobering.  It had essentially no success, though it was part of the grounding of political thought in the United States and several European countries in the tragicomic 1960s.

Visions of people as less altruistic but as at least concerned with their own self-interest may be considered on the “good” side, since they hold that people are at least rational and sensible.  Except for the narrowly economistic ones, these views have a better track record than the extremist views.  So far, the nearest to a successful political view—in the sense of a popular, widely-shared set of understandings, not a coherent political philosophy—is the broadly Enlightenent-based consensus of the “free world” in the 20^th century.  This is based on freedom (notably of speech and of conscience), mutual support, representative democracy, and parliamentary or presidential systems of government.  Several variants of this have worked very well, and changes from the basic Enlightenment model have led to rapid and dramatic social decline.  The farther from the model the states fell, the more they declined.  Notable examples of this process include Nazi Germany, the USSR, and the post-2000 United States.

The basic Enlightenment model takes humans as equal—if not totally equal, at least equal enough in their natural capacities to deserve equality before the law.  This obviously has to be qualified for children and the mentally incompetent, and has been qualified much more in usual practice.

Enlightenment philosophers saw humans as naturally wanting “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” (earlier, Lockean versions of that trio had “the pursuit of property”).  In short, people are dominated not only by a need for self-preservation but also by love of liberty and rational desire for happiness, material wealth, or “utility.”  The importance and basicness of liberty as a human psychological need is widely asserted in post-Enlightenment discourse, from Paine and Jefferson through Kant and Mill to modern civil libertarians.  “Liberty” meant to them not “license to do anything you want” but “freedom to do what you want as long as it doesn’t interfere excessively with others doing what they want.”  It is a political construction of the human need to control one’s life.

Freedom is supposedly desired not just as an instrumental matter (freedom solely in the sense of freedom to go after what one wants) but as a basic desired good in itself.  This remains a highly contentious assumption.  Genuine libertarians are few.  The ease and casualness with which westerners give up freedom is sobering.  Most of Europe cheerfully ditched freedom for the promises of fascism in the early 20^th century or communism in the later, and the United States has seen majorities opposed to the most basic and minimal civil liberties in the McCarthy and G. W. Bush eras.  Many other nations too have, at one time or another, given up all civil rights for even the shakiest and most dubious promise of “security,” or in exchange for state repression or extermination of unpopular minorities.  However, the need for freedom soon resurfaces.  European societies that experimented with abnegating it did not do well.  More recently, Asian and African societies that turn totalitarian have done even worse.  Their economies and societies declined and crashed (or, in some cases, such as China, are clearly about to do so).  Freedom seems to work as an instrumental good, even when devalued as an ultimate good.

5.  Political Philosophy:  Hierarchies; Leaders

However, humans seem to have a fondness for social hierarchies.  This perception animates bureaucracies and Hobbesian tyrannies, but the political philosophy that has done most with this is a much more hopeful one:  Confucianism.  (Confucianism was originally a political philosophy, not a religion or general world-view.)  Confucianism builds from the natural hierarchic order of the family, in which older protect and rear younger members, and younger naturally defer to older.

Confucianism structures this in a way unacceptable to most modern westerners:  superiors can be condign, subordinates have few rights, and women are emphatically below men.  However, Confucianism lays out strict guidelines for the morality of the system:  no tyranny, no brutality, no bullying; mutual aid and respect throughout.  These rules are often broken, but at least people know the rules are there.  Rulebreakers get considerable negative sanction.

Confucianism explicitly assumes that humans want harmonious social relations more than anything else—certainly more than material possessions.  Rational pursuit of material interests is recognized in Confucianism as a human trait, but is regarded as a low one—ranging from a necessary but lower urge to a downright unqualified evil, depending on which Confucian philosopher one is reading.  Social harmony—interpersonal goodness, mutual support, warmth, trust, and caring—is not only considered far higher in value, but also far deeper in psychological grounding.  The highest ideal is ren, “humanity” or “humaneness.”  Originally this was simply the word for a human being, liberated to stand for the basic human moral qualities.  It was later qualified, in writing, but adding the character for “two.”  It is the way two humans should act toward each other.

Confucian societies advocate liberty to varying degrees.  Mencius, the greatest Confucian philosopher, championed some freedoms that might shock a western Enlightenment figure.  For instance, he insisted on the right of the people to rebel against and throw out an unjust ruler.  From Confucius through Mencius and onward, Confucians have advocated de facto freedom of religion, though sometimes insisting that the people pay at least lip service to imperial cults.  China had its religious repressions—largely under not-very-Confucian rulers—but they never approached the insane religious wars of the west.

Also, Confucianism insists strongly on the duty of superiors to care for and listen to subordinates.  Still, Confucian societies are not free in the western Enlightenment sense.  They tend to be one-party states (if not outright imperial regimes) and they typically censor the press and other media.

Like the Enlightenment-based western societies, the Confucian-based eastern ones do very well indeed in the modern world.  Compared to modern societies of Europe and North America, women and subordinates in Confucian realms are relatively less well off, but not always much worse off; certainly not as badly off as women in many “Christian” parts of the west.

Other political philosophies have taken the hierarchy-basic, society-basic view.  The dominant political forms of Islam in the early middle ages were of this sort.  The great legal schools of Sunni are particularly striking in this regard.  They are now largely in abeyance, having been replaced either by European-influenced systems or by viciously repressive pseudo-Islamic systems miscalled “fundamentalist” by westerners, but they worked very well for centuries.

So running with the human tendency toward hierarchy and control, but trying to structure it for good rather than for ill, seems to be a workable strategy.  Indeed, it has generally been brought back into Enlightenment-derived regimes, most of which have de facto hierarchies that are often difficult to square with ideals of equality.  The United States today exemplifies a problem:  de facto hierarchy and lack of equality before the law (or anywhere else) combined with a rhetoric of equality that allows the rich and powerful to dodge any sense of responsibility or accountability.  If a multibillionaire who owns a stateful of legislators is really just an ordinary guy doing his job in a free society, he owes nothing to his neighbors or to the system.  Even if he inherited every cent of his wealth and every link of his power, he may say that other people would be where he is if they weren’t lazy; their subordinate status is their own fault, and no concern of his.  This would not be a believable—let alone a morally tolerable—position in a Confucian or traditional-Islamic society.

People who emerge as “natural leaders” are an interesting subset of humanity.  They can be good or evil; Lincoln and Hitler were about equally successful.  Saints and demons seem equally well represented in church leadership over the ages.  What unites them is a set of personal characteristics:  apparent self-confidence (not always genuine), good networking and social skills, empathy, “instinctive” ability to organize, and some form of personal charm or charisma.  The good ones are generally warm, even-tempered, and generous.  The bad tend to be experts at uniting people against a common enemy, especially a weaker scapegoat.  Some are con men, who perfect an exaggerated show of warmth, confidence, positive regard, and suavity; the success of this tactic speaks well for human goodness, but not so well for human ability to detect phoniness.  Humans are famously good at “cheater detection,” but a dedicated con man can fool many or most.
6.  Politics and Change

Cultures change.  The French and English did their best for centuries to exterminate each other, but now have been at peace since Napoleon’s fall.  The incredibly savage Norsemen became the peaceful, welfare-statist Scandinavians.  The violent Native American groups of the Upper Amazon were mercifully talked down by missionaries, though sporadic violence persists.

Chinese, Near Eastern, and many other dynasties rose and fell with almost clock-like regularity.  A strong conqueror would institute a regime that would grow gradually more corrupt and bureaucratized, and tax more and more highly an increasingly dense and impoverished populace.  Finally the people would rebel, and the cycle would start again (Anderson and Chase-Dunn 2005; Ibn Khaldun 1957).  People in power would pile their blocks of domination higher and higher till the tower fell of its own weight, and everything lay scattered and equal again.

A critical tilt-point in past societies has been the point at which massive sectors of the population had all their social concerns vested in local systems rather than in the empire or nation.  Barbarians may have brought down the Roman Empire (Heather 2006), but it was torn already by rivalries, and had broken into two from internal strains long before the barbarians could really prevail.  The Chinese dynasties almost all collapsed because bandits and warlords got more and more out of control; this in turn was because the national government simply did not seem to be delivering adequate peace, security, and economic management.  America’s own brush with collapse in 1861-65 had similar roots:  the country could not survive “half slave, half free,” and the slave half considered its local system worth rebelling for.  At present, for about half the United States, fundamentalist religion and giant-corporation greed have more appeal than national unity or even national survival.  The survival of the country is not assured.

Bosses’ salaries in the 1940s and 1950s were about 10 times those of their workers.  Today we no longer have “bosses,” but “CEO’s,” and their salaries in the US as I write (2006) average 411 times their workers’ salaries.  In the infamous oil industry, the average CEO makes 518 times as much as the average worker.

Concentration of wealth and power tends to lead to worse conflicts.  For many reasons, such concentration tends to get worse over time in any society, leading eventually to collapse of the system (Ibn Khaldun 1957; see Anderson and Chase-Dunn 2005).  The direct cause of collapse may be rebellion or invasion, but such attacks succeed only when the system under attack is weak; in large, hierarchic states, such weakness comes from internal stress caused by widening gaps between powerful and powerless.  Even a simple rise in population forces more social control and fine-tuning, leading to more and more problems with power.  Such regimes corrupt every aspect of society, even language.  The language of freedom, for example, changes (Lakoff 2006): in the United States, “freedom” once meant individual opportunity to act on one’s conscience and in one’s self-interest.  Now–at least in political rhetoric—it frequently means the freedom of the strong to do what they want to the weak.
Constant jockeying over power and control, even more than economic and military issues, makes societies change with incredible speed.  The rise of Germany and Italy in the 19th century, the creation and collapse of Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union in the 20th, and the enormous moral and lifestyle changes in the United States and elsewhere in the late 20th are recent examples of a pattern that has gone on since time began.  Longer and slower changes (Braudel’s longue durée) take their own course, rather independent of such sudden rises and collapses.

7.  Politics and Society

Attempts to fix the political mess by fixing individuals are hopelessly doomed.  They are unrealistic; people are social animals.  Also, the “emergent” nature of social life means that aggregating individual wills cannot produce a social system.  People are too variable.  “Saving the world one person at a time” is not only too slow (with seven billion people and counting), it neglects the need to integrate all those personal fixes into a single viable social system.  Each individual differs so much that if she “follows her bliss” or even “acts so that her every action could be universal law,” the world would be total chaos.  Do I really want it to be a universal law that everybody spends the day thinking and writing about political theory?  Or would I rather do it myself, while other people raise food, make wine, keep the power grid going, and develop new software?

Arts also fail.  As someone commented on learning that Stalin loved classical music and had quite good taste in it, “so much for the ennobling power of the arts.”  Individual spirituality and mysticism fail; they may, and often do, profoundly transform individuals for the better, but they cannot create a political system or even inform one.  People’s spiritualities are too different.

Individual transformation is neceessary in politics, and certainly in environmental politics, but it cannot be the whole story.  There has to be an institutional framework that can mobilize people, coordinate them, and get their individual transformations synchronized enough to have some social effect.  Human conformity is such that once there is a moral center to emulate, most will emulate it; but without some institutionalization of that center, no coordination can be expected.

What matters in politics, as Aristotle saw 2400 years ago, is creating a system..  Above face-to-face level, this can only be an organized polity (a state or at least a chiefdom) or a religion.  While religion has a far better record at creating and teaching good morality, organized religion—recall, here, that I include militantly atheistic religions like Stalinism and Maoism—has a notoriously appalling record at governing.

A key requirement here is setting up institutions that create a game in which people compete at being good.  Aristotle’s Athens was drifting away from that ideal—the old order in which the citizens (alas, only about 1/10 of the people) had to serve, and had to stand for election, in a city that valued performance.  Shabby performers won often enough to give us the word “demagogue.”   Still, Athenian democracy not only brought reasonably competent people to the fore, but also—more importantly—forced even the mediocre to do better.  By contrast, what Aristotle called a tyranny has all the rewards in the other direction; a tyrant does better the more bloody, cruel, merciless, and intimidating he is.

So competition needs to be structured such that evil people are forced to be reasonably good.  This may be called the “Nixon paradox,” from the success of the virtually sociopathic Richard Nixon at winding down the Vietnam war, recognizing China, and signing most of the major environmental-protection legislation of the last 70 years.   (It was on his watch that the Clean Air Bill, Clean Water Act, and Endangered Species Act became law.)   No one has succeeded to find the perfect formula for this, but most now agree with Aristotle that democracy is a necessary precondition.  Accountability and transparency are also necessary.

America’s Founding Fathers were acutely aware of this, and devoted much attention to figuring out how to tweak institutions accordingly.  They succeeded reasonably well; the current drift toward sadistic dictatorship in the United States has come about only through continued open defiance of the Constitution.

Marx made more explicit another teaching the Founding Fathers knew:  developing such institutions is best done through working together in a revolution.  Revolutions are, however, dangerously bloody today, when any serious fighting escalates into horrific bombing and potentially even nuclear war.  Moreover, in environmental politics, revolutions are neither conceivable (people simply don’t care enough) nor desirable, since violence on any large scale is the worst environmental destroyer of them all.  We will have to work to transform or propagate existing institutions.  This involves working together long enough and hard enough to develop a core of people who have been able to synchronize their ideas and practices.

Some specific political ideas have worked particularly well, and without revolutions, at that.  Among these are civil and human rights; all measures for maintaining equality of opportunity; public education; and democratic management of renewable resources.  Public aesthetics have worked surprisingly well; we forget how important art museums, parks, and similar amenities are to society.  Labor unions have successfully won protection for workers in most advanced societies.

Creaky and inefficient, but at least functional, are most mail services, road networks, ports, and the medical care systems of virtually every government except that of the United States (and even the US has a functioning system for military veterans).

Conversely, in a world where competition is amoral and destructive, good people are forced to do evil.  One can easily think of all too many examples without looking hard.  At best, good people simply escape the game.  Classically, they go off to the mountains to become monks and hermits and mystics.  Today, they merely retire into a private lifestyle.

This exercise in political theory is adequate to send two messages.

First, basic assumptions about human nature are the foundations of political theory. A political system is only as good as its human science.

Second, assumptions that work are those that give pride of place to human social needs, especially desire for social harmony and social order, but also for freedom and opportunity.  Systems based on assumptions that people are generically good or bad fail dismally.

One may suggest that the serious need in politics today is to look much more seriously at basic human nature.

Part II:  Hatred

1.  Politics and Hate

At the opposite extreme are government controls on hatred, bias, and war.  These work fairly well in a few small democracies, but otherwise are in terrible shape worldwide.

The Nazi genius was to see that if a government could succeed by whipping up hate, it could do the giant firms’ bidding and devastate the ordinary people economically and socially.  Firms need governments, and thus tend to take them over, or at least influence them by financial means.  Government elites revel in the financial benefits of this, but are to some degree accountable to the people, even in totalitarian regimes.  They cannot openly rob the poor and middle class to feed the rich.  If they do, they find the only way they can stay in power is by distracting attention from this reality by whipping up ethnic, religious, and ideological bigotry.  This fascist plan has proved influential; it is exactly the policy of dozens of countries today.
People vote their emotions, not with reasoned thinking (Choi 2006).  The result is not always pleasant.  People are easily persuaded to vote their hate instead of their rational or economic self-interest.  As noted, religion begins with high ideals, but if it becomes organized religion, it often becomes dominated by the most amoral and power-hungry members of society.  Since the stakes are very high but the actual ways of achieving power are usually internal to the organization and narrowly doctrinal, there is no way for performance or accuntability to matter much, or for justice and transparency to be issues.  The leaders need do little except toe the official line and play politics—or, in some such organizations, fake a few miracles. Moreover, there are no measurable system goals of any great moment, except money taken in, because no one can go to Heaven and return with firm statistics on the number of souls actually saved. And religions usually contain enough intolerant, mean-spirited clauses (usually, it seems, involving sexuality) to give evil and sadistic people a wedge.  So organized religion often becomes corrupt and tyrannical, from the Renaissance Catholic Church with its hereditary Borgia popeship to the more extreme Islamic rulers of today’s Middle East.  No other institution seems able to “sell” morality widely, so traditional religion can be desirable in a social polity. Conversely, network-based religious helping organizations are often among the very best of all organizations in terms of effective work done to aid humanity.  They have measurable goals, and personnel who join because they want to work on those goals, not because they simply want power and prestige.
In the 20^th century, even worse conflicts occurred over secular political ideologies (fascism, communism, conservatism, liberalism).  Most ridiculous of all hates, but the most deadly after religion and ideology, is hatred of inborn characteristics:  gender (and gender orientation), skin color, and the like.  Class hatreds are notorious, but have historically been rather minor causes of war, except in Marxian revolutions.  (The Marxian claim that all struggle is reducible to class struggle or struggle for wealth is demonstrably inaccurate.)  Culture, lifestyle, language, occupation, and every other fairly stable characteristic have become targets not only for group hate but for the resulting political persecution.
If the worst thing people have or do is group hatred, and if it is indeed embedded deeply in human nature, then the greatest need is to control it.

This involves recognizing that hatred is exacerbated by economic decline and especially by the relative social decline of the group doing the hating.  Other things being equal, group members hate their rivals in proportion to the actual threat to social or socioeconomic position that the rivals place.  The degree to which society is hierarchic then comes to determine how much hatred will arise, and how strong it is.  The more hierarchic the society, the more this jockeying for group position really matters.  Culture generally defines what groups are hated, but obviously—other things being equal—the most actually threatening group will be the most hated.

Extremist leaders, whipping up hate for political reasons, aggravate the problems.  Perhaps 99% of the people who commit genocide and the like are simply following orders or doing what they think society expects.  They may genuinely hate the victims, but they would certainly not indulge in mass killing without leaders provoking and ordering it.  There is considerable debate in the genocide literature on the levels of popular hate of the victims, from Hitler’s Willing Executioners (Goldhagen 1996), which argues that the Germans—the general population—really wanted to exterminate the Jews, to books that almost totally exonerate the followers.  I suspect truth is closer to Goldhagen’s argument; humans are a hating animal.  Certainly, the massacres of Native Americans and Australian Aborigines were popular causes, often done by ordinary people against the wishes of leading politicians  Even in these cases, however, the vast majority of the population are followers, not major perpetrators.  Hatred is human; mass murder is not, and requires a demented leadership.

The broad significance of this transcends American politics.  Especially in downwardly mobile times, people fear real threats, but greatly exaggerate them; they fear structural opponent groups, even the most innocent.  They fear truth, hence science.  Rather strangely, they fear sex—especially, any challenges to a defined sexual order.  Above all, they fear challenges to their most basic ideas about society and the world.  These ideas are usually religious.  In America, challenges to liberal and conservative ideologies brought major crises in the 2000s as well.

So came the “the end of the end of ideology” (Jost 2006).  Liberal ideologues after World War II had seen, and hoped for, the end of ideology—a time free from the fanaticisms of fascism, Communism, nationalism, and the like.  This did not occur.  As some anthropologists had predicted, religion came surging back to fill the void.  People need hope, solace, and basic belief systems.  The fascists and Communists had seen that, but the ideologues of the-end-of-ideology did not.

Thus religious extremism spreads worldwide.  It would seem truly difficult to be a militant fundamentalist Hindu, but a Hindu fanatical-extremist party ruled India for several years.  There and elsewhere, even one’s co-religionists, if they differed by a shade of dogma, were fair game.  This may not precisely be “ideology” in the classic sense, but Jost is right:  the moderate, technocratic world foreseen by social scientists in the 1950s was stillborn.  Similarly, hopeful dreams of “the end of history” and the triumph of the democratic state died in the rude awakening of runaway fascism, theocracy, and genocide in the 1990s and 2000s.

One may wonder if loyalty to any ideas, ideologies, groups, or political blocs is appropriate in these times.  Loyalty to humanity and to the planet seem better.  Drawing on any and every idea that can help—from Marxist to reactionary, from religious to atheist—seems the only hope.  We need everything we can get, and loyalty to a narrow ideology is a luxury we cannot afford.  In particular, the ideological “culture” war now gripping the United States is sheer suicide.

Theories of human action based on rational self-interest have collapsed.  Theories that succeeded were those based on the control need and the raw terror, fear, and hate that follow from thwarting it.

Worldwide, pathological leadership ideologies of the 21^st century seem to cluster around one type:  the mentality of the classic bully.  Such a person is anti-intellectual, cocksure, and certain that violence is the only solution to any problem.  Bullying leaders range from motorcycle gangsters to warmakers such as the fascist dictators and religious-extremist leaders of the 20^th and 21^st centuries.

One change that evoked bullying responses in the United States in the late 20^th century was the displacement of white males from their position of unquestioned dominance.  White males (and more than a few white females and nonwhite males) who felt entitled to dominance, and who also had a strong insecurity about control overall, naturally became fiercely conservative, and often took refuge in religions that privileged macho dominance.  It has been more than a little surprising to see how many women flock to such religious interpretations, whether Christian, Islamic, or other.  Some 50% of United States women follow religions that foreground female “submission” and subservience.  Many of these 50% enthusiastically further such goals.  Islam in at least some countries has been an even more extreme case.  One place I know, Malaysia, has gone from extremely liberal to extremely conservative in its Islamic rules for women, and the women have apparently been the major drivers of this change.  This has not been a return to strict Islam, either; the liberal views were held when Malaysian Muslim society was seriously Islamic, while the right-wing ones are not good Islam and have prospered as serious religious practice has declined.  Seeking security in a shifting world is clearly part of the reason.

2.  Politics and Irrational Ideals

One odd bit of political rhetoric in the last few decades has equated passionate commitment with political extremism.  This neglects—or, worse, devalues—an important middle ground:  people passionately committed to traditional moderate values.  Love of freedom, equality, justice, and protection—including protection for resources and land—is a moderate position, but at least formerly it was a passionately-held one in most developed countries.  This was true in the United States in my childhood, and I remember the passion very well, from my own parents and almost all the other adults I knew.  Passionate commitment got a bad name in the rhetoric-drenched 1960s, and has since been identified with extremism and evil.

The result is that the world has learned to tolerate genocide, slavery, and torture—not so much to approve them as to view opposition to them as too passionate and committed.  Firm opinions in the United States and Europe now seem largely confined to the lunatic fringes.  Thus hatreds flourish, but opposition to hatred does not.  For instance, hatred of gays became major “value” in American election campaigns, but tolerance for gays or anyone else is very languidly espoused.  The middle ground has become the realm of wishy-washy, indifferent, uninvolved citizens.

The world’s long history of dictators and repressive governments shows that even the most totally evil and corrupt leader or party can always succeed by whipping up group hatred.  People vote flagrantly, and admittedly, against their self-interest when they can vote against blacks, gays, “the government,” or “the religious right.”  Religious and sexual hate seem particularly deadly, and are often combined.

This puts the environment in a parlous state, since it is rarely involved in group hates.  When it is, the results are not good.  The anti-business rhetoric of the 1960s and wider anti-capitalist and anti-government rhetorics (left and right) of the 1990s and 2000s have been devastating to the cause—not because they were necessarily all wrong, but because they whipped up unsavory emotions, which inevitably called forth even less savory emotions on the other side.  Environmentalism got a bad name.  Worse, its principles were often subverted by extremists more interested in political agendas than in ecology.

Rationality wins in politics only when the hate-merchants are completely discredited—when they totally fail to deliver and are shown to be completely corrupt.  This is not a pretty comment on humanity, and not hopeful for the environment, but it does mean one thing:  the fight for the environment is necessarily part of a wider fight for tolerance and social justice.  It cannot be a separate cause.

George Marcus (2002) has pointed out that emotion is impossible to avoid in thought, especially in politics, but surely goes too far in writing off rationality.  We need to balance emotion and reason, with reason winning over hate.  Since hate is the strongest emotion, especially in uniting a large and diverse people, reason has serious work to do.

3.  Politics and Psychology of Hate

As one frustrated or scared child may throw a temper tantrum when another would stoically bear the discomfort, so one adult becomes a hatemonger while another works hard to deal soberly with the realities at hand.  One can, very broadly, divide strategies for coping with unpleasant exigencies into rational (figure out what’s wrong and fix it–with or without angry emotionality), stoical (just bear it), and fearful (the fight-flight response, irrationally applied due to panic or unbearable stress).  The fight-flight response can give us not only literal fighting and fleeing, but also withdrawal, collapse, and the social construction of anger that we know as hatred.
Rational coping typically accompanies mutual support among equals.  The fight-flight response usually leads to seeking social support.   As the fearful child seeks parents, the fearful adult puts himself or herself under the thrall of lords, dictators or the Society to which we should all conform.  On the whole, it appears that the more courageous and the more rational ways of coping depend on internalized social support and on long practice in coping with successively harder situations.  Growing up should provide both, but, of course, does not always do so.
Politics depends on emotion more than reason (Caplan 2007; Westen 2007), and fear is the most primal of emotion, the one that must be addressed first.

Possibly it would be best to eliminate those unsavory emotions altogether, but they seem hopelessly embedded in the human condition.  Moreover, they are there for a reason.  We sometimes have to defend ourselves against genuine enemies.  If we actually care about people, we know whom to hate, beginning with those who abuse power to hurt others for no reason except sadistic pleasure or gratification of pathological fear.  Such people may deserve no more than cold loathing, like cockroaches, but most of us can’t help hating them.  Conversely, a caring person is simply not going to hate someone simply because the other has a different skin color or language or sexual orientation.  Caring leads to maximizing help and minimizing hurt.  Other foundations of morality, especially those based on “fighting sin,” tend to minimize help and maximize hurt (even if the hurt is only to real enemies).  If one is concerned only in fighting sin, one will feel compelled to attack harmless and helpless deviants if they make any move toward sin, but one will not care if the neighbors are starving to death or dying of disease.  Helping others is not a concern of sin-shouters.

This being the case, both conservative and liberal philosophies, as found in modern America, seem counterproductive.  The conservative view now dominant is almost entirely hate; it seems based on religious intolerance, repression of women and minorities, oppression of the poor, and denial of civil liberties.  But the liberal creed seems now to be almost entirely one of anger at the conservatives.  The liberals and moderates in the United States are exceedingly thin on positive agendas or positive social causes.   They should build networks of help and care.  Even the terrorist groups in the Middle East have done that, no doubt for venal reasons (at least in part) but apparently quite effectively.

“Sin” and “harm” need to be politically separated.  Certain religions, at least in their meaner forms, seem to condemn all sexual behavior that deviates from the dullest and most mechanical.  They also tend to condemn good food, good drink, and good fun in general.  In such regimens, one can sin without harming anyone. Selling wine or poetry or Viagra is sinful because it increases worldly enjoyment.  In fact, one is often sinning by helping anyone in any way (except puritanical preaching), since helping people tends to increase their pleasure in life.

A functional society needs to stop harms, immediately and thoroughly.  It does not, however, need to stop sins.  Sins that harm no one are no one’s business except the sinnners’.  In fact, many modern societies are doing the emphatically right thing in encouraging certain “sins.”  We need to regulate wine quality, and maintain public art museums (inevitably stocked with paintings of nudes).

This being the case, there is no room in a functioning society for outlawing homosexual marriage and other victimless and harmless “sins.”  On the other hand, there is also no room for tolerance of sexual molestation of children.  That is physically harmful, and has to be stopped.  This rather goes against the policies of certain religious bodies that oppose homosexual marriage while tolerating wholesale molestation of young boys by clergy, or marriage of extremely young girls.

An example of misunderstanding the roots of a “sin” is provided by the current Christian attitudes toward homosexuality.  Most condemn it on the basis of St. Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, but do not understand what he meant.  St. Paul would have known only his own Jewish tradition, which bans all homosexuality, and the Greco-Roman tradition of older men and women homosexually seducing young boys and girls.  This latter is both a sin and a harm by almost anyone’s standards, and is what Paul is thinking of in Romans.  He would also have had no way of knowing the difference between people who are homosexual or bisexual for biological reasons—physical intersexuality or hormonal histories—and those who are basically heterosexual but try homosexuality for diversion or other reasons.  Both types exist, providing evidence for both innatist and lifestyle-choice views of homosexuality.  St. Paul goes from branding homosexuality as a sin to denouncing malicious and backbiting speech, thus making it clear that he is condemning actual social harms, not consensual pleasures.  One wonders why the current opponents of homosexuality do not quote Paul’s entire passage.

Sin is a matter of conscience; it is up to the sinner, and to earnest persuaders.  Harm is a matter of social concern and social policy.  Harms have to be stopped even if they are not considered sins.  Sins have to be tolerated by the wider polity if they are not harms.

Moreover, bureaucrats and middle-managers live in a world where almost all their job is dealing with personal conflicts and social problems rather than substantive issues.  They are usually more involved with soothing tempers and resolving staff fights than with saving the environment or reducing pollution.  Often, they do nothing but “manage” these micro-social ills.  This creates a mind-set in which nothing but trivial slights, disrespect, whining, and pettiness matter.  It is indeed a heroic or saintly person that can stand this for long without either leaving the job or joining in the pettiness.
Every society has to cope with the distribution of tasks and risks in the group (Durkheim 1933; Elster 1993).  Every society has to hold itself together. Powers-that-be inevitably take advantage of these issues.  The ordinary people in any group feel a need to conform, if only to ensure social acceptance.  Anyone in control of the media can manipulate beliefs and attitudes accordingly.  There always comes a point, however, at which people refuse to take the line any more.  It would be wonderful if we social scientists could predict that point.  Unfortunately, it remains the most profoundly mysterious of all social facts.
Key here is realizing that there are two kinds of hierarchies, or at least two ends of a continuum.  Some hierarchies are designed to do a job that requires centralized decision-making.  Such hierarchies exist in well-run companies and even armies.  Other hierarchies exist only to keep some people on top and others down.  The autocratic Old Regimes of Europe and Asia were typical.  In these hierarchies, power serves no one’s interest except the elites’, and the elites therefore must use brutality and treachery to keep the system going.  (The government does provide security, but only against other equally evil rival governments.)  Companies constantly harm themselves by mixing the two; all textbooks and how-to books agree that a well-run company will nurture employees and see the whole firm as a mutually-supportive partnership, but a vast number of companies and organizations suffer or fail because the bosses think otherwise.  Typically, they feel that they could not maintain power without terrorizing the workers.  This is sometimes correct, but only when the bosses in question have little else to offer.
The patriarchal family is a similar case, and no doubt the original one, the model for the others.  (How many languages use “elder”—signior, seigneur, and so on—to mean “lord”?)  In a well-run family, adults have power and children have less, but the family maximizes everyone’s benefits.  In too many families (especially, perhaps, today, in spite of local successes of women’s movements), patriarchal authority feeds on itself, and women and children suffer.  Puritanical religion grows from this, and more generally an ideology in which sin and immorality must be controlled by brutal repression of the weak.  “Structural violence”—devastation of peoples’ lives simply by the operation of a hierarchic system, with its laws and bureaucracies—is an ultimate result.
Also, hierarchies with definite, stable lines of power act differently from rat-fights in which people try to claw their way to the top.  The former may become almost beneficial, with reliable patron-client relationships based on mutual expectations.  The latter are always destructive.  Obviously, they minimize feelings of control of life.  No one on the bottom of a rat-fight hierarchy can feel safe or secure.  Inevitably, the vast majority of people in such a social system are on the bottom, or near it.  Slavery, too, is hierarchy gone mad; it corrupts owners as well as slaves, as de Tocqueville pointed out long ago (Elster 1993; de Tocqueville was probably depending, indirectly, on such accounts as Stedman 1988, which makes the point from personal observation).
The heads of “bad” hierarchies are not free from insecurity; quite the reverse.  “Uneasy is the head that wears the crown,” as Shakespeare knew, and the current leadership of the United States is even less well rested than Shakespeare’s kings.
One might expect the “good” hierarchies to flourish in upbeat times, the “bad” periods of decline.  This may be true; no one seems to have studied it.  If this is indeed the case, a downbound time becomes self-feeding.  As things get worse, people lose hope, get scared, and fall more and more into power hierarchies.
More clear is the relationship of “bad” hierarchies to regions of chronic violence, especially zones that have long been on the borders of great civilizations.  Much of the Middle East falls into this category.  Obviously, chronic violence over centuries is going to produce a need for permanent organization for defense.  Able-bodied males simply have to run life with a strong hand.  Also, paranoia becomes a fact of life.
Obviously, the more confusing the goals of the organization are, the easier it is for this to happen.  First, without clear and simple goals, evaluation is more difficult.  Second, the more different things the organization does, the more need there is for administrators who simply coordinate and people-work—i.e., who simply “administer.”  This is one of the causes of the nightmarish managerial revolution that has crippled (and sometimes nearly destroyed) many areas of enterprise in recent decades.
One well-known case is education.  Schools have to deal with exploding levels of federal oversight, legal challenges, poorly coordinated programs, real estate conflicts, and other problems.  Universities have become involved with research for corporations—often much more involved with that than with teaching.  This leads to legal challenges, town-gown interface problems, and much more.  There is no way to avoid hiring a huge, full-time bureaucracy that is not primarily committed to education, or even to research.  The result, unfortunately, has inevitably included parasitic, foot-dragging Weberian bureaucrats.  These multiply, and absorb more and more of the funding.  Attempts by legislative bodies to guarantee that funds go to classroom education are easily subverted.
In modern university systems, for instance, the growth of academic faculties and of their salaries and funding has largely stopped; growth in administrative positions, from vice-chancellors to secretaries, has been explosive.  At my former university, we once had one vice-chancellor; we now have about a dozen.  Enrollment has grown 400% in this time period—not enough to explain the increase.  Meanwhile, scholarship has steadily lost ground as a factor in promotion, giving way to administrative experience.   The administrators are not necessarily out to help the institution.  One chancellor diverted the state allocation for library acquisitions to redecorate his office.  No one could stop him.

The steady devaluing of scholarly and technical competence exacerbates economic decline.  This decline in turn makes career administrators more and more needed.  In universities today, scholars are rapidly declining in status, partly because there are so many of them; often, 200 candidates apply for one job.  By contrast, good administrators are rare—so rare that many colleges must settle for less than the best.  Also, as administration becomes more and more specialized, the ordinary career administrator is less and less likely to have “done time” for long as a research scholar.  All this militates against good administration remaining the norm.  In fact, more and more administrators are venal and self-serving, in academia as in other realms.  What is worse is that even if they are reasonably dedicated and professional, they are career administrators who have made it through political infighting, not workers who have made it through job-related knowledge and skill.

Remember Weber’s point:  one need not attribute this to personal evil.  I have seen many a warm, caring, nurturant teacher turned into a nasty, petty bureaucrat by middle-management academic administration.  A professor is concerned with teaching, mentoring, researching, and public speaking.  An associate dean or official in a vice-chancellor’s office is concerned with maddeningly petty trivia—scheduling, budget details, classroom space—and with irresponsibility above, discipline problems below.  Instead of dealing with the best work by the best students, she has to deal with the worst problems of the worst ones.  This may ensnare her in the world of police and lawyers, not a pleasant place for an academic.  The more caring and focused she is, the more inexorably she is drawn into living entirely for the crises of the moment.  Research and mentoring are forgotten.  Fatigue sets in as problems produce one sleepless night after another.  Only the amoral and cynical can survive long under such circumstances, and so they inevitably populate the higher levels.  I understand the same is largely true of hierarchic organizations in general.  Pace Lord Acton, middle management may corrupt even more absolutely than real power.

Since ancient Greece, almost every commentator on politics has recognized that top-down systems of this sort crush enterprise and progress.  They do it partly by open repression, but more by keeping labor docile.  This makes exploitation pay better than development.  (“Exploitation” here means coercively redistributing a fixed or declining social product from workers to bosses; “development” means increasing social product per capita.  Exploitation is a negative-sum game, development positive-sum.)  Egalitarian systems, by contrast, tend to maximize individual feelings of self-efficacy, and to allow workers to unite to better their condition.  This makes labor more expensive, forcing the bosses to use higher technology—substituting expensive progress for even more expensive workers.  The high technology, in turn, creates a demand for innovation, and displaced workers find jobs developing even higher tech.  Theoretically, this can go on indefinitely.  It does necessarily not lead to a resource crunch, since higher technology can be made more efficient than lower.
In a well-run voluntary organization, the system goals are clear enough, and good enough, that people can be evaluated by how much they foster those, rather than by what “good administrators” they are.  Recourse and peer review are substantial and immediate, and measurable standards exist.  Every administration textbook says this, as well as describing the necessity of full transparency for it, but the problems of implementing it are such that few organizations even approximate the ideal.

Thus, during the 1990s, voting became predictable.  The League of Conservation Voters tracks conservation legislation, scoring congresspersons as to how they voted.  Its scoring logic is not perfect, but is the only one available.  The LCV seeks out big-spending issues where the “bad” vote is one in favor of heavy subsidies, the “good” vote one in favor of cutting spending.  Thus in 1997, bills opposed by the LCV would have funded road-building in national parks; maintained the enormous subsidies for logging roads in national forests; subsidized mining companies; poured billions of dollars into the notorious Animas-La Plata water scheme, long a target of just about every activist and populist in the west; subsidized grazing on public lands; maintained the enormous and thoroughly odious sugar subsidy for Florida growers (the state of Florida, meanwhile, voted to continue its state-level equivalent); and backed a number of toxic waste dumps.  The total expenditure would have been in the hundreds of billions of dollars.  The vote was close to solidly partisan; Republicans voted for these vast giveaways, Democrats against.  This was a typical year.

In 1998 the Republicans did it again: the LCV scorecard noted bills providing tax breaks and subsidies to logging, mining and grazing interests, as well as vast road and highway construction funds (a giveaway to construction interests that had donated heavily to campaigns), and more.  The only “big money” proposal that helped the environment was one for funding development of energy efficiency (see The Scorecard:  1998 National Environmental Scorecard, October 1998, League of Conservation Voters, Washington, DC, 1998; also Doyle 1998).  The Republicans did try to “save taxpayers’ money” by gutting environmental enforcement, but these measures would have ultimately cost the American people billions of dollars a year in damages.  In 1999 the party gap was clear:  Democrats received LCV average scores of 76 (Senate) and 78 (House), Republicans 13 and 16 respectively.  Again, most of the issues involved taxpayer subsidies for environmental wreckage, not protection of free markets or reduction of overall spending.  Again, the regional point needs to be made, however:  Democrats from the South dragged down the average (some had LCV ratings of zero), and Republicans from the Northeast pulled their party up (some had 100% LCV ratings).  So what seems a partisan difference is perhaps as much a regional one.

One need only compare this to the 1950s.  Then it was the Republicans who opposed wasteful environment-wrecking pork barrel projects, and the Democrats who generally upheld them.  Both parties worked for conservation.

References

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