On holiday the other week, the scientist I was with mentioned in passing the essential importance of science in civilisation. He didn't exactly say it was the greatest of all human endeavours, but he meant to. And he's got a point - as he put it (I'm paraphrasing) without science and engineering we wouldn't be able to do anything - in this case, build the nice cathedrals. Now, this kind of argument is overblown, and reductionist (try doing anything without language), but the point is a good one.
And I was still thinking about the most important of human endeavours when I read this article. It's not a very good article, attributing here to capitalism what my friend was keen to do to science, namely a wide ranging power independent of other important aspects of human life. However, it did make me think about another of the great human endeavours - Government, or rather the state.
The state gets a bad press a lot of the time, especially from the right, though even the modern left can be a little grudging in its praise. Rhetoric of the last few decades has been about how to modernise or roll it back. This language is unhelpful, and inaccurate. Apart from a few extremists, most of the right don't even want to roll back the state. They think they do, but actually they just want to change its shape. While the shorthand is convenient, it's not accurate - the right of the state to engage in an area tends not to be disputed, merely it's efficacy. And the objectors tend to forget that they want the state to guarantee all the freedoms they want. For example, a libertarian may claim they want the state to refrain from criminalising drug taking, but actually they want it to do that and to stop other people from interfering too: it's simplistic and wrong to simply talk about rolling things back. In this case we're debating how it acts with regards to drugs, not whether it can or should.
Because the state is amazing. The modern state is an extraordinary feat of complexity that has incomparably improved the lot of humanity, against anything that has gone before (note: it's also capable of being the most powerful agent of death as well - a testament to its power). However, it's the principle that I'd like to concentrate on.* The development of the state has a real claim to be the bedrock of human achievement. Without it, there can be no real co-ordination of human activity, no mechanism to secure anything and build upon it, no mechanism to either create wealth or redistribute it. For that, we should be grateful. Hobbes put it best: without a state (or as he put it, in the state of nature), the lot of man is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.
Precisely because it is so important, one must take the government to task for policy failures or rank incompetence, and we have to alert to structural failures - which I think it where we are now. As the current phase of the economic crisis unfolds, there's a lot of chat about whether we have transposed a banking crisis into a sovereign debt crisis. There's obviously truth in that, but I don't think the maths add up. America, the Eurozone and even the UK can pay their debts, though it will hurt. Yet both the US and Europe seem to lack the political machinery to make that happen. Civilisation isn't going to end, but it's going to be worse (a lot worse than it needs to be) because of ignorant populism in the states and Germany, and a misguided mis-match of political and economic union across Europe. The politics and the failure of the political dialogue poses a greater threat to the outcome than the raw economics.
I'd normally make a point here about the need to limit the role of the people in any constitutional settlement, but I'll save that for later. Really, the point is that governing is hard, but failure of government is far far worse. Nozick's classic and complex book is now famous for preaching close to the reverse, but ironically, I can use his title to points in the right way . I don't think we can get to utopia (remember: no place), I'm much too much of a Hobbesian Conservative pessimist for that, but it's a lot closer to the state than it is to its absence. We should be arguing about the nature of what the state does, but we should be very grateful for what we have, and terrified of the prospect of its failure.
* There is certainly a long anthropological literature here about definition which I will have glossed over / go wrong . I don't care: the principle stands
The state gets a bad press a lot of the time, especially from the right, though even the modern left can be a little grudging in its praise. Rhetoric of the last few decades has been about how to modernise or roll it back. This language is unhelpful, and inaccurate. Apart from a few extremists, most of the right don't even want to roll back the state. They think they do, but actually they just want to change its shape. While the shorthand is convenient, it's not accurate - the right of the state to engage in an area tends not to be disputed, merely it's efficacy. And the objectors tend to forget that they want the state to guarantee all the freedoms they want. For example, a libertarian may claim they want the state to refrain from criminalising drug taking, but actually they want it to do that and to stop other people from interfering too: it's simplistic and wrong to simply talk about rolling things back. In this case we're debating how it acts with regards to drugs, not whether it can or should.
Because the state is amazing. The modern state is an extraordinary feat of complexity that has incomparably improved the lot of humanity, against anything that has gone before (note: it's also capable of being the most powerful agent of death as well - a testament to its power). However, it's the principle that I'd like to concentrate on.* The development of the state has a real claim to be the bedrock of human achievement. Without it, there can be no real co-ordination of human activity, no mechanism to secure anything and build upon it, no mechanism to either create wealth or redistribute it. For that, we should be grateful. Hobbes put it best: without a state (or as he put it, in the state of nature), the lot of man is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.
Precisely because it is so important, one must take the government to task for policy failures or rank incompetence, and we have to alert to structural failures - which I think it where we are now. As the current phase of the economic crisis unfolds, there's a lot of chat about whether we have transposed a banking crisis into a sovereign debt crisis. There's obviously truth in that, but I don't think the maths add up. America, the Eurozone and even the UK can pay their debts, though it will hurt. Yet both the US and Europe seem to lack the political machinery to make that happen. Civilisation isn't going to end, but it's going to be worse (a lot worse than it needs to be) because of ignorant populism in the states and Germany, and a misguided mis-match of political and economic union across Europe. The politics and the failure of the political dialogue poses a greater threat to the outcome than the raw economics.
I'd normally make a point here about the need to limit the role of the people in any constitutional settlement, but I'll save that for later. Really, the point is that governing is hard, but failure of government is far far worse. Nozick's classic and complex book is now famous for preaching close to the reverse, but ironically, I can use his title to points in the right way . I don't think we can get to utopia (remember: no place), I'm much too much of a Hobbesian Conservative pessimist for that, but it's a lot closer to the state than it is to its absence. We should be arguing about the nature of what the state does, but we should be very grateful for what we have, and terrified of the prospect of its failure.
* There is certainly a long anthropological literature here about definition which I will have glossed over / go wrong . I don't care: the principle stands
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