The last section expressed the fear that our elites have allowed a new economy to be misused to push an unbalanced social contract. To make this a positive statement, one could coin an observation I will call The Immerwahr Principle. It says:
Technological change well may alter social contracts. But no matter how they change, eventually they will settle down into a new stable state. In that state, certain things remain always true.1
Always True
Despite rumors to the contrary, no matter what else changes, the wealthy will always depend on the talents of workers to maintain their wealth. Since they owe a debt to society for their opportunities, they always retain an obligation to fund a social safety net, education, infrastructure, science, and environmental protection (never mind the prevention of wars). It is never justified for the wealthy to skip out on their obligations to the society that made their good fortune possible. These basic principles remain always true. Any proposed vision of technology-driven social change that does not respect this principle must be false.
To be fair, it isn’t only the right wing that abuses rumors of social change driven by technology. The far left can be equally mendacious. Let us try to complete the statement of our principle to keep it balanced. We should add:
It also remains always true that there will always be scarcity, and there always be conflict over scarce resources.2 There will always be a special class of wealth creators who retain extra privileges as a result of their outsized contribution to society. As a result, there will always be inequality. It is equally true that a vision that does not respect this principle must be wrong.
We are seeking a middle ground.
Middle Ground
There is another way to describe the middle ground we seek. We might characterize a basic philosophical difference between the left, the center, and the right. They hold three competing visions of the purpose of government.
Move far enough right, and the belief is that government’s purpose is to get out of the way. Maybe it should grease the wheels of commerce, or regulate it to prevent the worst abuses. But fundamentally, it should step aside. Government should allow the invisible hand to do its thing.
However, this policy often generates far more suffering than its proponents’ optimistic projections anticipate. This result gives rise to a counterbalancing vision from the left. They believe government should act as Robin Hood. It should take from the rich and give to the poor. In this vision, excessive wealth is essentially stolen. The government’s purpose is to take it back.
What lies between these two extremes? What ground is left for the center to occupy? The essence of the third, centrist vision, I propose, comes into being only when an enlightened segment of the wealthy sees the value in an activist government.
Suppose one is wealthy enough to have already bought all the normal things money buys: nice houses, fast cars, tasty food, comfortable travel. What is there left to want? It is not difficult to imagine that an enlightened rich person’s wish list would continue with things only an active government can provide. Peace, security, respect, participation in an optimistic and thriving society, solid infrastructure, an educated workforce, a healthy environment… all these things are covetable too. Highly covetable, even. If these great gifts can only be had because of government action, the wealthy themselves should see the value in it.
This realization provides the basis for an alliance between the most enlightened members of the wealthy and the rest of the society. They have reason to want the same things. They have reason to share a dream of government activism. Together, they can use government to impose discipline on the more short-sighted members of the wealthy class, and defang the worst rabble-rousers.
This manner of alliance, I propose, is the essence of centrism.
Trouble is, in an era where the effect of technology is unclear, such alliances become harder to forge. It is easy for the less enlightened but more aggressive of the rich to spin a Grand Illusion. In their fantasy world, they don’t depend on the rest of society. They don’t need any of the things only government can provide.
Of course, reality is that thing which doesn’t go away even when you stop believing in it. Eventually, even the wealthy will be forced to learn of their mistake. The hard way. But then everyone else has to suffer through their learning experience.
Saved by a Janitor
Our tale of the genesis of a new conservatism contains just such a learning experience. Konrad Adenauer only barely survived the Nazi era. His life was saved by a janitor.
Originally, the Nazis did not target Adenauer, despite his status as a political rising star in the Wiemar Republic. Remember, he was a conservative! They could hardly tar him as a dangerous leftist. Reportedly, Adolf Hitler personally admired his effectiveness as Mayor of Cologne.
However, after the attempt on Hitler’s life, their paranoia increased. They sent Adenauer to a labor camp, and he fell ill. There an ex-janitor turned prison functionary “discovered Adenauer’s name on a deportation list to the East and managed to get him admitted to a hospital.” [TODO? reference for quote. Gotten from Adenauer’s Wikipedia page which itself references the German page ]
This personal experience of dependence informed Adenauer’s governing consciousness. Everyone was in it together: Adenauer knew it, voters knew he knew it, he knew voters knew he knew it. This confidence knit the whole system together. It made a new centrism possible.
The lesson has slowly been forgotten. The confidence which informed that ruling alliance is draining away.
A Grand Illusion allows the least cooperative members of the wealthy class to deceive themselves—and everyone else. It weakens those among the wealthy who might wish to take a longer view. It takes up the space of ideas in which a new language might be developed. If that language existed, it might make possible an expression of the common interests of the wealthy and their workers.
In the face of such a crisis, an inspired representative of the Dismal Science could have an outsize influence. By generating a language to express common interests, he could overcome these centripetal forces. He could debunk the self-serving delusions pushed by the worst of the wealthy. He could devise a language to forge a new alliance.
The Missing Populism
There is a third way that I might characterize the fundamental difference between liberals and conservatives. We have been holding this crystal up to the light, turning it through all its facets. We have looked at it through the eyes of a philosopher, and through the eyes of the wealthy. But how does it look from the people’s perspective?
There is a fundamental difference in the message of a liberal or a conservative populist. A liberal populist proclaims to the people “We feel your pain! And we will fight for you!” They promise to extract resources from the wealthy to better support those less well off. They propose to balm the pain of the poor with a salve of wealth extracted.
A conservative populist says to the people instead: the liberal populism may be all very well. But it will make you dependent. Do you want that? Do you really want that? Don’t you prefer independence and pride? Support may be all very well, but isn’t opportunity better? Do you want to take from the rich? Or do you want the chance to become rich? Which do you truly want?
There is a third proposal, which is conspicuously missing. A new political story with the conviction of a conservative but the activism of a liberal. It might start by agreeing that people primarily want opportunity, independence, and pride. But that does not mean the status quo is fine, or that there is no need for an activist champion. Maybe in a mature era opportunity is simply provided. But in a time of transition, these things must be fought for. Not only fought for, but re-imagined.
Such activism is necessary not merely for the reform of society, but even for its stability. If the conservative message no longer rings true, liberalism alone cannot take up the slack. To misquote the book of Matthew: “The people shall not live by redistribution alone.” Meatier myths are necessary to nourish a healthy society.
The Trümmerfrauen
Konrad Adenauer’s West Germany was an example of a politics of conservative rather than liberal activism. The trauma of the previous forty years had destroyed the old promise. The feudal era had promised to the most energetic the chance to distinguish themselves on the battlefield—and win glory, and thus wealth and renown. Since the days of King Arthur, even a kitchen knight like Sir Gareth could, with sufficient valor, shake off the taint of mere food service. But the romance of Gareth or Lancelot died in the trenches of World War I. Choking on the froth from burnt lungs, these myths died a horrible death.
For many years, that society reeled from the resulting trauma, casting about wildly to define its identity. But under Adenauer’s steadying hand it began to build new myths.
One such was the Trümmerfrauen, or Rubble Wives. As the story goes, at the end of the war the streets were filled with rubble. A large proportion of men were missing: either killed in the war, missing in action, or held prisoner far away. Filling the breach, women sallied forth to clear the streets with their bare hands. Statues celebrating this mythical effort dot German cities in both East and West.
Scholarly articles question the reality of this mythology. It isn’t clear how many women participated. Nor whether any significant proportion of the rubble was cleared by women. When they did participate, it was usually in return for extra rations. So it wasn’t exactly the spontaneously self-organized outburst of constructive civic participation that it was later made out to be. In any case, it was not an effort that would have been celebrated at the time. “After the early 1950s, Trümmerfrauen did not feature in public discourse—unless in a negative context… Clearing rubble did not lose its associations of punishment and economic exploitation in the West for several decades.”
But as the new, prosperous society developed, the image became a “comforting founding myth and a national memory in West Germany.” When East and West reunified, that memory had sufficient resonance to both sides to make it a bridge to a shared culture. That only enhanced its appeal.
It was an entirely new kind of myth. Instead of celebrating those who lived in palaces, it celebrated those who lived in ruins. Instead of celebrating an unchanging social order, it celebrated those who broke out of standard roles to rise to a challenge. Instead of celebrating the will to fight, it celebrated the will to build.
Now, this mythology did not faithfully depict the people who met the true challenge of the ruined state. It was hardly an exact portrait of those who transformed their broken country into one of history’s greatest economic miracles. But of course Sir Lancelot and Sir Gareth do not exactly describe the reality of feudal knighthood either. It was less a description than a romantic glorification of the essential energy. But as such it captured something essentially new.
The Economic Romance
We have been circling an idea to which I wish to bestow a name. The changing eras we have described might be characterized essentially by a relationship. In each case, it is a relationship between the wealthy leaders of society and the most energetic and aspiring from the striving classes. From the shape of that relationship derive society’s cherished myths. Those myths give order to society. They inform people of their place, give them a direction for their efforts, and offer an avenue for their dreams.
When technology changes everything, when it truly changes everything, what it changes is the shape of that relationship. A myth such as that of Sir Gareth and Sir Lancelot, and everything it represents, dies. Sometimes horribly. If the death is particularly awful, it is memorialized bitterly by poets. It becomes “The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est Pro patria mori.” The society reels from the depth of that betrayal. But eventually it finds a new notion of Sweetness and Honor to which to cling.
What we are seeing now is the beginning of the end of the old romance. And, if one looks carefully, the beginning of the beginning of a new one.
Implosion
In other words, we are entering a time of transition. As the history to which we have been alluding suggests, such transitions can be extremely dangerous. As the old romance dies, it becomes unbalanced. The wealthy use new technology as an excuse to break old obligations. Yet they jealously retain all their accustomed prerogatives. Such an unbalanced social contract will, eventually, be convulsively rejected. That rejection leaves behind a vacuum of authority.
Politics, like nature, abhors a vacuum. Sadly, it tends to fill such a void with the worst kind of authoritarian demagogue.
The basic malady that leads to the rise of authoritarianism is a void of leadership. In such a void, a dishonest and violent character can claim, with some modicum of credibility: “I alone can fix it!” That is to say, a situation where every rational or civilized politician is nowhere near knowing how to “fix it” creates opportunities for the brutal.
Antidote
What is the antidote? Sadly, it is both simple and terrifyingly hard: the aforementioned civilized people have to figure out how to fix “it” for real. That sucks the oxygen out of the demagogue’s lies.
In this task, they have two massive disadvantages: Since they tell the truth, they can’t falsely claim a fix that isn’t real. And since they are civilized, they can’t scapegoat, vilify, or resort to any of the other political tricks that can stand in for real solutions. These never work and yet seem oh-so-appealing. When these tricks are forbidden, it becomes much harder to seem masterful. The only way to seem masterful is to be masterful.
Now, I don’t think we are in quite the desperate straits of Fritz and Clara—yet. However, many of the aspects of their story are becoming relevant to us. Even becoming relevant sooner than I would have guessed. If such dire straits lie in our future, it is not too soon to start thinking about it, even if it is far off. As I said earlier, one has to be prepared long before the time to correctly set the railway switch.
The Immediate Crisis
Not only that, but I think we are experiencing a different problem, which is an immediate crisis. To say it simply: voters don’t trust nerds anymore. As I mentioned, Konrad Adenauer was personally boring and forgettable. Yet voters re-elected him for fourteen years. They kept him in office until he was eighty-seven. Why such attachment to such a forgettable nerd?
Because they trusted him. They believed he was doing everything humanly in his power to deliver them peace and prosperity. And not prosperity only to the elites, but to everyone, even the least of them. Even to widows living in an endless sea of rubble, swallowing their pride to clear it with their bare hands. That is to say, doing work which had previously been reserved for prisoners and slaves. Yet, Adenauer built not just a new economic order, but also a new social and moral order which retrospectively granted that work dignity and pride. Through this feat, he earned the people’s trust and loyalty.
But now that trust is draining away.
It isn’t even the fault of the politicians themselves. As I said, politicians choose their policies from a buffet of options served up for them by intellectuals. If nothing there seems inspiring or even palatable, it is hard for political skill to make up the difference. It is the lack of imagination of intellectuals that is the problem. And not just their lack of imagination for coming up with policy proposals, but their lack of imagination for coming up with the basic worldview that gives those proposals form.
Enter, again, our dream of a Psychohistorian who can step up to the challenge. We need the Dismal Science to disabuse the wealthy of their dangerous illusion. We need economists to convince the wealthy that they benefit from investing in society. We need them to create a vision of activism to restore the conservative values of opportunity and productivity. We need them to imagine a new economic romance: a new deal between the wealthy and the strivers of the world that expresses how badly they need each other.
Better Clara, Revisited
So, what does it mean to be a better Clara? We live in a different world than she did. In particular, nowadays there are veritable villages of experts who opine on the kind of questions with which she grappled. Ostensibly, at least.
The difficulty is that it is entirely possible that no one knows. Anyone who claims that their intimacy with new technology gives them clear insight into the shape of the new social order it will generate is lying. Sometimes technology is truly transformative—that is to say, it has in itself the potential to reshape the social contract. Then the engineers who are deeply intimate with it, gain from that experience some intimation of its potential. But such intimations tend to be vague and confused—even downright phantasmagorical.
Not only that, the experience is sufficiently unpleasant, even terrifying, that few people are inclined to report what they have learned directly and clearly. It feels like a fever dream. It can break the sanity of the people who experience it. It can even drive them to suicide. Though the main part of this book is pitched to those who expect a clear, logical exposition of ideas, in some of the introductory essays I try to convey both the phantasmagorical quality of the source material I draw on, and the disturbing quality of the experience of being exposed to it. Our Clara must help to dig out the animating logic of these fever dreams to make it amenable to analysis by our Psychohistorian.
We do have one advantage that Clara and others like her did not possess. This has all happened before. Her experience may have felt like a fever dream, but we can look back on it with the equanimity of hindsight. Our perspective can discern patterns in the fog that she could not see. A similar fog descends on us; a similar miasma wracks us with fevers and chills. But we have hope to find a lodestar3 which can guide our path. If we could find a correspondence between the older perplexity and our own, we can use our hindsight about the past to guide us into the future.
Using this method, it is possible to predict the shape of the new social contract that our new technology “wants”. The method is not easy or obvious. We are going to have to muster every reserve of careful logical thinking we possess. Not only logical thinking, but also emotional honesty. In order for this technique to work, we have to both recall the past and face the present with an exacting realism. It goes awry if we indulge ourselves in comforting fantasies about either.
But if we can manage it, we can use the past to predict the future. In the rest of this book, we will see go over the steps of this story carefully and slowly, to make sure we get it right.
[TODO: this conclusion is perhaps too poetic and not specific enough. Is this frustrating? Maybe I should try to fix it. Possibly put a more direct guide to what to expect in each of the coming chapters.]
