In our fragile society, what other hope is there?
Cross-posted from Aurelien’s substack
I don’t usually write follow-up essays, but this week I’m going to make an exception. Last week’s essay reached a very large audience and attracted a lot of comments, and the discussion made me realise that there is still more to say in certain areas, and so I should perhaps get on with it. (Ironically, given today’s subject, a Substack outage yesterday has held up publication.)
It’s a paradox of writing longish essays that people usually want you to write even longer ones. So I get complaints about leaving things out, but very rarely about putting too much in. Thus, people pointed out that—as I hoped I had made clear—the discussion was limited to the West, and this was deliberate. Whilst I’ve had the good fortune to see a reasonable part of the world in my time, I don’t think I have the depth of knowledge required to enlarge the discussion beyond the West. Other people pointed out that I had offered analysis rather than solutions. This is true also (although I did link to an earlier essay where I discussed how people and groups had responded to despair and ultimately overcome it) because I have no delusions of being a teacher or leader, or being wiser than anyone else. I’ve always been impressed by Samuel Beckett’s decision to leave lecturing at Trinity College Dublin because he couldn’t teach things he didn’t fully understand himself. Indeed, I emphasised that some of the problems that I discussed don’t actually have solutions, and that’s the point from where we need to begin.
So today I want to extend the argument to two linked points, which I skated over very briefly last time in the interests of space. One is the gap between vision and implementation, and the other is the disconnect between the micro and the macro level. Both reflect an increasing concern of mine: that our current ruling class views the world and its problems in what I can only describe as a “magical” fashion, and not in a good way at that.
The first is essentially a version of the old argument about the interdependence of strategy and tactics. Tactics without strategy is just aimless thrashing around, whereas strategy without tactics is just an empty exercise. One of the reasons why the West is in such an unrecoverable mess these days, is that it is fixated on short-term tactics, but has no real strategy except at the declaratory level. And that strategy, pitiful as it is, has no particular relationship to any of the tactical-level initiatives actually undertaken: it lacks what the military call the operational art, which turns strategy into a series of organised tactical moves towards a defined objective. Staying with the military discourse for a moment, we can see this very much in the current western approach to the war in Ukraine, where vague strategic goals (“overthrow Putin!”) are accompanied by disjointed and disconnected tactical initiatives (“carry out a raid on the Crimea!”) which have no discernible effect on the progress of the war, but which are least possible to carry out. As I’ll argue, this is essentially a type of magical thinking.
But it’s been like that for a long time. In one of my very earliest essays, I pointed out that the West has very largely lost its capability to think and plan in any kind of long-term sense. Thus, we are continually out-pointed and disappointed when dealing with states who at least make an effort to look to the future in an organised fashion. The West is rather like the manager of a sports team who turns up just before the match, and says “go out there and do whatever seems sensible to you.” Not a good way to win matches, usually.
In my last essay, I pointed out how unusual and contingent were the initiatives to set up a functioning modern state in certain western countries, for example. They required both a long-term sense of the interests of the countries concerned, and an ideology that encouraged the pursuit of these interests. As I’ve argued before, for cultural reasons the Anglo-Saxons were never especially keen on long-term planning and implementation, which is why better-organised states began progressively to eat their sandwiches from the 1970s onwards. And of course this reluctance, and the disappearance of any real capability for planning and implementation, mean that, even among western states, Britain and the US are now particularly ill-equipped to cope with—never mind anticipate or overcome—the kind of crises I wrote about last week. I’ve sketched out some social and political reasons for this in the past, but in this essay I want say more about why the ideas of “de-globalisation,” or “on-shoring” among others will be practically impossible to implement for structural reasons. This is especially true in Anglo-Saxon countries, but now true to almost the same extent elsewhere in the West, given the progressive dominance of Anglo-Saxon ideas.
Visions are easy, but the West has progressively lost the capacity to formulate and operate mechanisms for putting them into practice. In part, this is because there is very little inherited understanding left of the necessary practical steps. For example, re-shoring manufacture of some pharmaceuticals would involve activities that most politicians and pundits have never heard of, let alone be able to describe. Finding and importing supplies of chemicals, designing and building factories, recruiting and training skilled technicians and graduates in chemical engineering (having set up the necessary courses first, naturally), dealing with all the various health and safety hazards, setting up a distribution system for the products … I doubt if much of our current ruling class and its parasites has any idea even of the steps involved, let alone how to sequence them. By contrast, there’s a great deal of experience in closing factories, making workforces redundant and tying yourself to overseas suppliers. But unfortunately, that’s not much use here.
Although there are many cases of rebuilding manufacturing after conflict and destruction (see World War 2, passim), and examples of deliberate transition of economies from one kind of production to another (several Scandinavian countries) there are no examples, so far as I know, of countries deliberately giving up an industrial capability and subsequently trying to regrow it successfully. In any event, as I’ve pointed out, a capability is much more than a factory: it’s a whole set of connected human and material assets, arranged in a coherent sequence.
The Anglo-Saxon (now more broadly western) fixation with archetypal heroic entrepreneurs and university dropouts has obscured the historical fact that no significant industry, and no key technology, has ever been developed without some level of planning and government encouragement. Very quickly, for example, states realised that iron ore, coal, and steel-making capability were important national assets, and acted accordingly. The modern idea that even strategically-important goods can come from anywhere so long as they are cheap would have seemed incomprehensible even half a century ago.
Half a century ago … yes. The British case is particularly instructive, because it was a precursor and an example. The British fiddled for some decades with the idea of an industrial policy and a national plan, looking at the the success of the French efforts which led to the TGV and the Minitel: a generation ahead of Britain. In the ‘sixties, the fixation was with Germany and Italy as competitors, from the seventies it was Japan that was laying waste to British industry with imports which were reasonably priced, and actually well-made and reliable. This led not to real changes in behaviour, but to half-hearted follow-suit initiatives, like the abortive National Plan of the 1964-70 Labour Government. And it also subsequently made a whole generation of management consultants rich, as they told companies to teach their employees Aikido and Zen Buddhism so they would understand Japanese management secrets. But in Britain, as in most of the West, domestic manufacturers just gave up: by the 1980s, if you wanted a high-class television, you bought a Japanese one, and indeed you still do. Some things can’t be recovered from.
The British Conservative government elected in 1979 decided on an entirely different approach. Rather than imitating Britain’s successful competitors, it decided to do the opposite of what they did, and essentially to rely on magic. Now I don’t use that word idly. I don’t mean magic in the austere High Magic sense, but in the vernacular sense of rituals and spells which are supposed to bring about changes in the real world. Thus, all the government had to do was to create the right magical environment (low taxes, few regulations) and the “animal spirits” (interesting choice of words, that) of entrepreneurs would spontaneously do the rest, through the “magic” (interesting choice of words, that) of the “market.” The magician, however, having summoned up these powers, should make sure to stay well away from the working.
This ideology, entirely devoid of any empirical foundation at all, came to dominate quickly, because it was culturally acceptable in a country that disliked vulgar manufacturing, which preferred manipulation of abstruse symbols to actually doing real work, and which secretly hoped to find a magic lamp which would generate money without the need for actual effort. This was most obvious in attempts to control inflation, which, the government argued, was the principal obstacle to a national economic revival, because it “complicated the calculations” of businessmen, the poor things. Because inflation was believed to be a result of too much money in the economy, then the amount of money had to be reduced by making it expensive to borrow, hence high interest rates would bring inflation down, no matter how paradoxical it might seem to attempt to reduce prices by putting them up. But that’s magic for you. Of course, the rate of inflation could be measured in many different ways, and the flow of “money” in the economy depended on which definition you used. Nothing daunted, the government began to “target” the growth of M3, one of the definitions of money, convinced that through symbolic manipulation and the recital of incomprehensible formulae, the rate of inflation would come down. (Thus, the story of the dazed Conservative MP leaving the Chamber after one more jargon-infested announcement by the Chancellor, and muttering “I thought M3 was a Motorway.”)
In reality, massive increases in interest rates put costs up, and so relaunched inflation, while at the same time, together with an overvalued Pound, they wiped out large sections of British industry which were never rebuilt. Never mind, said the government, inflation will come down and everything will all come right after “long and variable” lags. It didn’t, of course.
I dwell a little on this story because it was the first real sighting of the faith-based approach to government which has characterised the modern era. Instead of doing things, governments “create the conditions” for others to do things, and sit back in hopeful anticipation. Serial failures, in true New Age fashion, meant that the spell was not right, or more usually that it was not used with enough will and conviction. The idea that governments should actually do things is considered a quaint anachronism. The idea was to have a Court Magician who would make amazing things happen: the most recent incarnation is the misnamed AI, whose output can fool you into thinking it’s an oracle, if you don’t look too hard.
As a result, where governments actually did have to do things, there was no tradition or capacity in planning and implementation to fall back on. Covid demonstrated this, in the search for some magical gizmo that would solve the problem without the large-scale government programmes that were no longer possible. Vaccines, for all their questionable efficacy, could be presented as “creating the conditions” for people to return to work, so enabling the government to declare the problem solved. The incoherence of Mr Trump’s attempts to rebuild US industry through tariffs, and the ignominious retreat this seems to have provoked, are simply the latest example of the magical thinking that says vague aspirations can be converted into specific results through willpower and the creation of the right “conditions.” In reality, it seems unlikely that anyone in Mr Trump’s confidence has the remotest idea of what would be practically involved in rebuilding US Industry. Likewise, the incoherence between ambitious, high-level American plans in Ukraine, in Gaza and in the Middle East more generally, and their desultory and amateurish execution, has been much noticed.
But these problems didn’t start yesterday: they are the result of decades of wanton neglect, and even destruction, of a capability for turning strategy into specific actions. Consider, for example, the contrast between the US construction of an international alliance for Gulf War 1,0 and the political shambles of its successor. Whatever you think of the earlier episode, it was skilfully and professionally carried out, and had a simple strategic objective: the creation of a wide international coalition to drive Iraqi forces out of Kuwait. By contrast, the second episode was pure magical thinking, whereby an invasion would “create the conditions” for a peaceful, democratic pro-American state. Don’t ask me how. Don’t ask them how, either.
Or consider the difference between the shambles of Brexit and the management on the British side of the 1991 European Union negotiations. Whatever you think of British objectives in 1991, they were largely achieved, because the government machine, though weakened, was still capable of acting effectively and turning political aspirations into specific activities. By 2016-19 that machine had largely been destroyed, and even had it not been, the capability for strategic thought had pretty much disappeared from the higher reaches of government. Boris Johnson seemed to think that he could just wave a magic wand and the problem would be resolved. Or consider finally the Falklands War of 1982, which was fought on the British side by armed forces that had not yet been Thatcherised. Whatever you think of the rights and wrongs of that War, it was a considerable technical military achievement, that stunned the Argentinians. It was already clear by the time of the Basra debacle in 2008 that this capacity had effectively been lost, and today’s British armed forces, like most others in the western world, are probably damaged beyond repair.
Thus, whatever may be the incoherent strategic objectives western governments set themselves in trying to navigate the appalling challenges of the future, and even regain lost ground if possible, they are highly unlikely to be achieved. Not only is the technical capability lacking, but the very thought-processes are absent as well. Oh, certainly some firm of management consultants or other can be paid a fortune for a Powerpoint presentation, but things will get no further than that. It’s already clear, for example, that the much-touted “rearmament” of Europe will not happen, and mainly because of hopeless confusion about the issue at all levels. There is no real understanding of what rearmament would be “for,” and what strategic purpose it would be meant to serve. There is no real understanding of what it would look like, except that it apparently involves spending huge amounts of money. There is no understanding of the fact that money, by itself, does not magically result in the supply of the necessary goods and services, even if there were agreement about what those would be. There is no strategic concept against which operational needs could be defined, and no understanding now of how to do that anyway. And so on and so on. The fruits of decades of magical thinking have now fallen from the tree, and they turn out to be bitter indeed.
The disconnect I have highlighted between the strategic level and the level of implementation is the link to my second topic. Inevitably, as the capability for holistic thought and planning has been lost, governments and others have found themselves adopting little ad hoc measures which they delude themselves, when aggregated, can collectively be passed off as a “strategy.” In reality, of course, the process should work precisely the other way round: you start with the strategy. (Mr Starmer has apparently said, in interviews, that he has no ideology or strategy: he’s just a manager, he says, who deals with problems as they arise. He says it as though it’s a virtue, not a weakness.) Naturally, then, governments don’t really have strategies for dealing with the massive environmental and climate challenges of today and the near future, for example: they just have sets of disconnected initiatives from brainstorming sessions organised by management consultants, many at cross-purposes with each other.
It’s partly a question of timescale. Human beings notoriously prefer short-term benefits over long-term ones, and will even take long-term risks to enjoy them. This year’s flu epidemic in Europe was unexpectedly lethal, mostly because people didn’t bother getting vaccinated. In France, only about 50% did, and the most popular reason for not doing so was the desire to avoid possible unpleasant short-term side-effects. The result is that a sizeable proportion of the unvaccinated wound up ill, many very ill, quite a few in hospital and a significant number dead. All to avoid feeling rough for an afternoon (which in my case didn’t happen anyway.) It used to be the task of competent governments to compensate for these short-term human tendencies by investing for the long term, and by setting up schemes such as state pensions, with benefits far in the future. But the time-horizon of politics has increasingly contracted, to the point where what really counts is the instant effect, the transient bounce in the opinion polls, even the extent of favourable coverage in the media. This has been made cruelly clear in the case of Ukraine, where national governments are competing with each other to attract political attention and news coverage for their next lunatic idea, only to abandon it the day after in favour of an idea more lunatic still.
The result is that the machinery and the competence, and even more the capacity for strategic thought and planning, do not exist at anything like the level required to tackle the really major problems discussed in the previous essay. To take a simple example, the price of gas in Europe is likely to rise very sharply in the next few years, and there may be actual shortages if the Russians decide to be awkward. There will be electricity outages in the winter and people will be without heat and power because they can’t afford it, or it simply isn’t available. The last time anything similar happened was the 1973 oil crisis, which resulted in well-organised countries such as France and Japan turning to crash nuclear programmes. The thought of any western country having the imagination or the resources to mount any programme of such ambition these days is laughable. We can imagine a procession of politicians telling people to buy warm clothes, run around to keep warm and invest in solar panels, which if you are an unemployed single mother living on the fourth floor of a tower block isn’t particularly helpful.
Yet in a way this minimalist, short-term approach is understandable, even if it’s not very attractive. The combination of really large and potentially insoluble problems, and a radically reduced capability to deal with problems of any kind, virtually dictates that governments will at best be reduced to merely fiddling with things, and at worst just spend their time arguing about whose fault it is.
The same, ultimately, goes for local governments, private companies, voluntary groups and campaigning organisation. We know, for example, that most of the effort that goes into recycling is wasted. Often, this is because the work is left to private companies, who have no incentives beyond profit and so employ the cheapest workforces they can find. (Governments have effectively destroyed their own ability to implement any genuinely ambitious recycling schemes.) Yet on the basis that anything is better than nothing, I do sort rubbish into categories, put organic waste in special bags, and refuse plastic bags in shops. Collectively, millions of people doing that adds up to a lot. But the problem is that the total size of the problem is immeasurably larger than the sum total of the initiatives that individuals can take to deal with it. This, as I shall discuss in a moment, is why scale is such an important issue.
The result is that, because the size of the problems we face in many areas is overwhelming, critics, activists and others fasten on anything that can be done quickly, whatever its real impact, just because it can be done, and also because often it will not affect them. (Green politicians are notorious, for example, for never recommending or introducing measures that would really impact their own middle-class lifestyle.) And often they practice what can only be described as Punitive Environmentalism, designed to punish other people for the state they have allowed the planet to get into. In Paris, where the Greens are influential, their flagship policy has been to forbid the heating of café terraces in winter with gas burners, thus destroying one of the few pleasures of Parisian winter life. In this way, climate change will be reversed, apparently. Or rather, a futile, magical gesture will be made because futile gestures are all we can do. Think globally, in other words, act spitefully.
But not only do these kind of examples illustrate problems of scale, they also illustrate the degree to which magical thinking has infiltrated every area of political life. (Is it a coincidence that you see so many adults reading Harry Potter novels?) Symbolic acts, such as stopping people drinking coffee outside in winter will somehow, through some unexplained mechanism, lead to a solution to global warming. (They can also be seen as a very late and secular form of human sacrifice, or if you prefer ritual flagellation, designed as always to solicit the favour of the gods.) Likewise, gluing yourself to a painting and demanding “action” by government is not a political act, it’s a magical theatrical ritual. Interrogated about their objectives once unglued, activists fall back on ritual chants about “doing something” and “taking global warming seriously.” And that’s it.
The discrepancy between the sheer magnitude of upcoming problems and the sum total of the ideas for dealing with them, no matter how individually well-founded, is partly because few of us are capable of comprehending what really large numbers mean. For example, because colonial powers (initially Arabs, later Europeans) established capital cities on the coast of Africa, many African cities are at extreme risk of flooding from rising sea levels. The city of Lagos alone has a population of 21 million people, and the capacity of its authorities to deal with catastrophic flooding is, shall we say, limited. On a smaller scale, the same is true of Algiers and Dar es Salaam, among many others. Altogether, perhaps fifty million people could be driven out of major cities in Africa through rising sea-levels alone, and the indirect consequences for Europe, for example, are potentially enormous. But those numbers are too big to think about.
Doing things on a small scale as a contribution to tackling big problems is entirely reasonable provided we don’t get the scales confused. We’ve all probably had the experience of a proud friend or relative telling us about the solar panel they’ve installed, which heats all the water for their showers in the summer. That’s well and good, but it’s obviously not scalable beyond a certain point. (A few months ago I was on a train passing through Eastern France on a cold winter morning with mist covering the fields, and we stopped for a few minutes opposite a massive, and obviously idle, solar power collection facility, which I could dimly see through the mist.) Indeed, all the studies I have seen suggest that we cannot, even in principle, hope to provide for our current level of energy use from renewable sources. Thus, something fundamental will have to change, but that’s too big a problem to think about. So let’s demonstrate against nuclear power instead.
A major reason for the difficulty in understanding scale is the rise in population, which has produced qualitative, rather than quantitative changes in vulnerability. Archeologists have found ancient cities which were abandoned because of climate change and other reasons. But the difference between abandoning a city of, say, 50,000 people, and abandoning a city of a million people or more, is not a difference in scale, it’s a discontinuous difference of type, and it may not actually be possible beyond a certain size. Consider a city of a million people in a low-lying area flooded because of unexpectedly heavy rain and rivers bursting their banks. Assume this is in winter. No power, no heat, no sanitation no running water. How would you even get a million people out, and where would you put them? How would you feed them, accommodate them, tend to those who have been injured or have chronic illnesses? How would you even get emergency services into the city in the first place? Emergency planning manuals (the ones I’ve seen, anyway) don’t even try to set out procedures for such circumstances: sensibly, they largely describe disasters and emergencies that we think our societies and governments can actually cope with.
Effectively, therefore, we have built highly complex, extremely fragile, urban systems that will collapse, perhaps terminally, after relatively little stress, and which depend absolutely on the continuity of power and fresh water supplies for ever and ever. Because there is no reversionary mode, and no Plan B if anything goes wrong, we rely absolutely on the favour of the gods for our survival. (Even as I write this, reports are coming in of massive power outages in Spain and Portugal.) But the problems involved if something goes wrong are so terrifyingly large and insoluble that we don’t think of them, and we install bike lanes instead.
There is a parallel problem with food. We tend to assume that the food we buy in a supermarket, or that we eat in a restaurant, just appears magically. True, some of us may live in or near the countryside, and we may also see fields of grains or herds of cows from our car. But a little enquiry shows that the tomatoes we bought have a label showing that they were produced in another country hundreds of kilometres from our borders, or for that matter that bananas come in most cases from other continents. They just kind of magically arrive, and we seldom give any thought to how.
But of course they don’t, and the Covid crisis demonstrated this, when sudden and inexplicable gaps appeared on the shelves in supermarkets. It wasn’t just that ships with imported food weren’t sailing, it was that workers at wholesalers and delivery companies were away sick, and even that parts to repair vehicles and deep freezes were not available. Over the last generation, food distribution chains, which used to be quite simple, have taken on a hallucinatory complexity, not least as sub-contractors and sub-sub contractors have become the norm. The resulting system seems supernaturally complex, especially since its main purpose, after all, should be to make sure we have enough to eat. Yet in fact, the actual purpose of the system is to make as much money as possible for shareholders and managers. Western states thus depend for their very survival on elaborate and complex food distribution chains that are designed to reduce costs to the bare minimum, and have little or no redundancy in them. All we can do is pray that they are not greatly disrupted.
Although “food insecurity” is something usually associated with Africa and Asia (which indeed is where the greatest problems are concentrated) most western states are net food importers. The British government publishes every three years a Food Security Report, that makes interesting reading. It shows, for example, that the UK imports about 40% of its food, including foods that simply cannot be grown there for practical reasons. It particularly imports fruit, vegetables and (ironically) seafood. It notes that agriculture in the UK (and for that matter Europe) is very vulnerable to energy price increases and supply-chain disruption. And there is little prospect of expanding food production dramatically: 70% of the surface area of the country is already used for agriculture, although much of that is unsuitable for growing crops. That reminds us once more of the issue of scale: the population of western nations has increased massively over the last century or two: the land area, for obvious reasons, hasn’t. And of course the complexity of food distribution has increased out of all recognition even over the last couple of generations, which is perhaps the most fundamental point of all.
So essentially, the western world, consuming far more calories than other regions, is relying for its continued existence on highly complex, fragile, interconnected, just-in-time, profit-oriented systems for food supply and distribution, which have no appreciable redundancy and which could not fail for more than a few days without causing enormous problems. (Imagine something as simple as a massive hike in the price of petrol, which would force many haulage companies out of business.) We can only pray, I suppose.
Perhaps there are solutions which can resolve these problems at the macro level, and if so I would like to know what they are. The problem is that, whilst it’s possible to construct entirely imaginary and artificial scenarios indistinguishable from magic, where all is made right, it’s very hard to see them being practically possible. As an economist would say, assume an all-powerful, all-knowing world dictatorship staffed by people of unimpeachable integrity, and the rest is easy. (Actually, like a lot of these things, it’s easy in principle, it’s just unbelievably difficult in practice.) It’s enough to make you wonder whether our rulers have some kind of satanic death-wish for the planet (and ultimately for themselves) or whether they just lack all imagination. After all, constructing over decades a world system that is highly fragile, based mostly on short-term financial priorities, and which has now become so complex that unpicking it would be impossible even if the will existed, is behaviour which, in the aggregate, is insane.
Some things are actually impossible to visualise: our own death is the classic example. But some things are just bigger and more complex than our brains are capable of processing, and the likely progressive disintegration of the world system is one of them. Can you imagine, for example, what it would be like for a western city of even a million people to become uninhabitable, either permanently or for a few months (in practice it amounts to the same thing.)? I can’t, and neither, I suspect, can most people. Can you imagine a million climate refugees camped on the shores of North Africa, hoping to get to Europe, with more arriving all the time? How would we deal with that? And then add runaway infectious diseases among them to the mix.
Science-fiction writers have always known that you cannot really describe disasters on that scale sensibly, which is why from John Wyndham to JG Ballard they have concentrated on the effects on small groups. The same was true, I think, of the cycle of disaster movies of the 1970s. There are just some problems that we cannot wrap our neurones around, and so we do one of two things. We try to ignore and minimise them, such that our vision of the world (and thus our ego) is not disturbed, or we recoil from the big picture and take refuge in the detail, with things we can understand at a scale we can assimilate. (And of course the unscrupulous will just seek to benefit, as they always do.)
Now few of us wanted this situation, and even the glassy-eyed utopian ideologues of the 1980s didn’t actually think it would turn out this way. But the combination of immensely complex and fragile systems with the ever-decreasing capability to manage them, or even stop them disintegrating, is lethal, if only our rulers realised it. After all, ask them how the population and industry of Europe is going to manage in an era of massively more expensive natural gas, and they have no idea, other than that some magical solution will pop out of a Powerpoint presentation. As Mr Cohen said, we have seen The Future, and it’s murder. All our rulers can do is wait for a miracle.
Be the first to comment