It is certainly true that we live in a world dominated by
discourse. A world in which aesthetic is king. Even in the world of the
intelligencia, to which society goes for wisdom produced by long, slow and
specialised reflection, trend and consensus, which feasts on lazy and
superficial thinking, is depressingly dominant. If you can train yourself in
art of exchanging clichés then a glittering career as a public intellectual
could well be open to you, that is of course if you’re not interested in
becoming a career politician.
A great example of the power of aesthetic in shaping
intellectual climates of opinion is the rise and fall of Marxism. A philosophy,
though more accurately a political economy, brought to power by a revolution in
Russia at the beginning of the 20th century and then demolished with
the falling of a wall in East Germany at the end of the century. Though what
either of these two events actually correlate with or tell us about the
contents of Das Kapital really is a mystery, yet these were the seminal events
upon which the fate of the ideology in fashionable intellectual circles turned.
As the great economist of the Austrian school Henry Hazlitt once said, we don’t
seem to refute our enemies anymore, we simply say farewell to them, just as we
never seriously endeavour to understand ideologies we simply wear them as
badges to show off and distinguish ourselves to and from others.
If indeed we did care about reckoning with the intellectual
tenants of Marxism then we would soon find out that the death knell had already
fallen upon it much before 1989 or even 1917 as the economists who pioneered
the marginal utility revolution, like Karl Meneger and Eugen Bohm Bawerk, tore
up the foundations upon which Marx’s economics and thus his historical
predictions rested, as early as 1871, only four years after Marx published
volume one of Das Kapital. Just as the vast intellectual flaws in the idea of
constructing a socialist economy were pointed out by Ludwig Von Mises in 1920,
in his article on economic calculation, only shortly after the project got
underway in the Soviet Union, thoughinterletuals seem to have acted as you had
to wait to 1989 to be privy to this reality. However you will seldom catch any
of Marx’s undertakers or any of his attempted revivers mentioning any of these
names or attempting to address any of the specific and technical problems which
they highlighted, such as the redundancy of the labour theory of value. Indeed
reading much of the popular and academic reflections on the legacy and validity
of Marx one would be forgiven for not realising that the man was an economist
at all. Instead we are overwhelmed with refutations along the lines of smugly quipping
that Marxism doesn’t account for ‘human nature’ or defences that centre around
framing the recent financial crisis as being the old man stealing the last
laugh on Fukayama and friends, as if Marx was the first and only economist to
point out that capitalism can suffer crises and periodically slide into down
turns.
I mention this topic specifically by way of introduction
partly to agree with the Lost Cosmipolitan that the world of ideas is all too
frustratingly inhabited by those who swallow and regurgitate sound bites and
intellectual buzz words, leaving the post-modernist to wreak havoc when he ties
his opponents in linguistic knots fashioned from their own verbal veneer. But
also to specifically address his query about why we are now banned from ever
talking about class, even in a society of increasing inequality, because even
though I would agree in believing this to be a dismissal based on shallow
foundations, im not really sure if anyone truly knew what they meant back in
the day when wielding the critical hatcket of ‘class conflict’ was wide spread
and commonly accepted, so why bringing it back in anything like its old form will
do us any good is something about which im extremely doubtful. When Terry
Eagelton, Eric Hobsbawm, Slavoj Zizek, Robert Skidelsky, David Harvey and Tony
Judt amongst others vaguely tell us that we have to return to Marx, though
steering clear of its Bolshevik mutation, to give us inspiration once again for
solving the problems of our time, surely we can only weep as to how utterly
unimaginative and stultifying these intellectuals are, because for one thing they
certainly aren’t ‘radicals’. Could we at least have a go at parroting some
other ideology before we let scientific socialism back into the saddle? Could
we at least understand what Marx meant when he used the words such as
‘exploitation’ and the technical economic definitions he gave to them before we
resurrect them once again.
Though back to spectre of the post-modern Vladimir Putin,
which our lost Cosmopolitan brilliantly illustrates in his article, surely
instead of just saying bravo to the elegance of the post-modern Tsar’s
performance, should it not instead provoke a need to firmly and confidently
restate our principles, for those amongst us who still believe in the ideal of
liberal democracy and who still broadly vibrate to the manifesto of Fukuyama
and strangely still think Neo-conservatism has something to say for itself?
Like Emmanuel Kant responding to David Hume should we not at such a moment like
this be awoke out of our dogmatic slumber and think it a scandal that the
legitimacy as well as the clarity of our position was ever lost and that we now
have a president of the USA who sees himself as nothing more than a
‘pragmatist’ and a global caretaker instead of a policeman. Does anyone else
have a problem remembering his name; Barrack Carter or Jimmy Obama? Should we
not to such a provocation, emanating from Washington as well as the Kremlin, have
the instinctual urge to repeat Samuel Johnson’s cry ‘I refute it thus’.
So in an rough attempt to do this, here we go . . .
Concerning the first of the two pillars in Fukuyama’s
vision, which is free-market economics and the recent ignominious implosion of
the Washington Consensus, can we not still recognise the comprehensive triumph
of free markets in the 20th century as the superior model of
economic organisation and the only game in town when compared to command
economies or bloated social democracies? Though more importantly can we really
continue to stand silent and powerless as this great institution is being
destroyed by incessant government intervention in the form of massive and
disastrous bouts of central bank inflation and money printing, which only lines
the pockets of top ten per cent whilst producing asset bubbles and resultant
economic meltdowns which leave the bottom 10% unemployed. Can we really say
after these splurges of cheap government produced credit that flood the housing
market, which is politically skewed by the government creations Fanny May and
Freddie Mac, that free markets are the cause of all our woes? When the tax
codes and business regulation of most western economies resemble encyclopaedia
Britannica can we really blame the wolfs of Wall Street for our stagnant growth
or should we look at something a little less visceral in the great degeneration
of the rule of law to the rule of lawyers. When we declare that Neo-liberal
economics has failed in places such as South America and gloat because we’ve
found an exception to the rule which thankfully stops the people of the third
world from suffering the agonies of capitalist consumerism, can we not heed the
words of Hernando de Soto who reminds us that his native continent has never
seen the success of free markets because it has not yet established the
necessary requirement of functioning and reliable property rights upon which a
market depends? And if not then how can we go about explaining the East Asian
economic miracle, the great elephant in the room, if not the tiger?
Ultimately returning to the start of this article can we not
define and clearly understand what we mean when we use words and phrases such
as ‘free markets’ and ‘capitalism’ and learn to compare them to the plain
mechanics of reality before we continue labelling cows as sheep and
subsequently get distraught when they don’t bleat. If we can’t, then could the
door be possibly left any wider open for the post-modern critique? If we live
in a world in which Austerity means broadly maintaining current levels of government
spending, instead of cutting them with aim of freeing up resources for use by
the private sector, then it’s no surprise that Austerity hasn’t worked for the
plain reason that it simply hasn’t been tried. If we lose the plain meaning of
words then we only have ourselves to blame when we become disillusioned with a
world that we’ve failed to engage with, in the most basic of terms.
Moving onto the political, which is the second of Fukuyama’s
pillars, which suffers from similar linguistic maladies as the economic, there
are other whales of words which need to be harpooned as Robert Conquest once
put it, if we are to fully value, appreciate and understand our inheritance
left to us by the European enlightenment. The biggest whale word of them all is
‘democracy’. The reason that this word has become somewhat infamous is because
we have forgotten and neglected how it should relate to and serve other
concepts such as liberty and freedom, rather than confusingly becoming a value
or an ideal in and of itself. As Karl Popper pointed out in his invaluable work
The Open Society and Its Enemies
democracy and elections are not the foundations of a free society. This instead
is the rule of law in service of the liberal ideals of championing the freedom
of individual, which find their best expression in that creation of the
enlightenment, namely the US constitution. The democratic process itself cannot
hold a candle to the importance of this creation but instead is simply the best
mechanism that we know of to protect the undue disturbance and erosion of the
principles of the constitution. It does this not by being able to select the
best leaders to office but instead by giving us a stable mechanism by which bad
leaders can be peacefully ejected. Indeed relying on the wisdom of crowds it
promises little else. Thus even Churchill was subtly wrong when he described it
as the worst system of governance except for all the others. He was well
founded in his pessimism, just imprecise for calling it a system of governance
rather than a mechanism of preservation for a system of governance.
Once this whale has been successfully harpooned, or this
‘weasel word’ vetted as Friedrich Hayek might put it, we can start to clear up
or at least qualify some of dissolutions with the inevitable march of
democracy. As the Venezuelans are finding out just because you freely elect a
government it doesn’t mean they won’t slowly take away your freedoms by
increasingly asserting their control over the nation’s means of subsistence,
also known as the economy. And it will be interesting to see if the Venezuelans
will be subject to the same revelation as the Palestinians if indeed the day
does come when at the ballot box when the Venezuelan population decides it no
longer believes in the Chavista revolution, that sometimes even if you’re rulers
once sought a democratic mandate it doesn’t mean that they will necessarily ask
for it ever again and that some groups are more than happy to be elected into
office but certainly won’t stomach the idea of being elected back out again.
Realising the proper definition of this word should
hopefully help us in our efforts to export it. The examples of Germany, Japan,
South Korea, Taiwan and a list of other countries in which US efforts, at least
in part, has helped contribute to the creation of a thriving replication of its
own self, should prove that if done
correctly, it is a more than worthwhile venture for both the USA and the
countries in question. Doing so might involve backing dictators such as Augusto
Pinochet, President Marcos or Suharto and even though we can’t be casual in
this pursuit we shouldn’t be eternally embarrassed either. It is unashamedly in
everyone’s interest to export our model of economic and political governance,
or one might call it an ideology if they were feeling bold enough. Just as it
is in nobody’s interest to do it in an unrealistic and ham-fisted fashion, such
as in Afghanistan. We need to temper our passions with the restraint of strategic
minds of the Kennan and Kissinger ilk, which is why I would agree that the USA
has no dog in the Ukrainian fight and this article is not a call to arms over
the Crimea. But equally we should never forget the purpose and importance of
our cause, even if we don’t label ourselves ‘indispensible’ or ‘exceptional’, terms
which will certainly come back to bite us when they take on a meaning and life
of their own as we once again forget what the words are meant to stand for or subtly
the ideas they represent. But if we want a coherent foreign policy then we
can’t afford to label ourselves simply ‘pragmatists’ either, as this is only a
tactic and not a goal even though it might masquerade as a replacement for one.
The insidious problem of submitting to the post-modern
critique is that in submerging oneself in its relativism one becomes
increasingly vulnerable to those who seek to use it as a cover for the
promotion of sinister absolutisms. In name of battling Western hypocrisy we
have to pair millennial ideologues with apocalyptic weaponry by arming the
Iranian revolutionary guard with nuclear weapons. Genocidal dictators such as
Saddam Hussein and his crime family have to be left the undisputed owners of
the oil of Mesopotamia in order to plough the proceeds into accumulating vast
stock of armaments of both the conventional and non-conventional variety. And the
world would be a much better place if only the two neighbouring regimes
mentioned were left by the side of each other to pursue a WMD arms race for a
second round of the one million casualty conflict they fought throughout the
1980s. And of course being alarmed that this might take place on top of the
world’s most important energy supply is disgusting by the virtue of the fact
that in our cynical post-modern discourse energy security which relies on oil
should be reviled more or less inexplicably for its own sake as if the latter
three letter word was some horrible bodily excretion. If US armed forces are
seen only as agents of hypocrisy where one narrative is only as legitimate as
the next then we have to become the bed fellows of and learn to co-exist with
the like of Slobadam Milosovic, Charles Taylor and Saddam Hussein for whom the
world is surely better off without. And
any attempt to argue the case that western military intervention would have
been welcome in other crises situations, such as Rwanda or Darfur is also surely
but further lost to the detriment of mankind.
So in conclusion as impressed as we might otherwise be with intricacy
and elegance of Putin’s postmodern foreign policy we shouldn’t find ourselves powerless
to respond on the plane of ideas and thus inclined to sink into perennial cynicism
or the pathetically apologetic retreating tone of the Obama administration who’s
foreign policy from day one has been a continual reassertion simply that he isn’t
George Bush, but unfortunately the time might come when he has to answer in the
affirmative, or at least his successors might have to. However to successfully
defend the legitimacy of the cause of Liberal Democracy we need to have a coherent
understanding of what it stands for. That its economic foundations even though under
threat are superior to any other and that it’s political structures can benefit
all peoples, though their success is dependent on more profound details specific
to each location than just holding elections. It is only once we understand the
causes which we pursue that we can both defend them and act upon them in a
coherent manner, as only coherent arguments are meaningful or moral ones and if
we lack coherence then the postmodern critique is indeed apt in pointing out hypocrisy
and showing everything to be relative.
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