Can't Do, Won't Do!

But striking poses is fun and easy.

I saw a little notice this morning saying “5000 subscribers around the next bend.” That’s far more than I ever expected for long and complicated essays about difficult subjects, so thank you very much, all of you, especially for the fact that there has been very little churn, and I’ve only lost a small number of subscribers along the way. And thank you particularly to those who continue to toss me a few coins and buy me a cup of coffee.

A reminder that these essays will always be free, but you can support my work by liking and commenting, and most of all by passing essays on to others, and to other sites that you frequent. I have also set up a Buy Me A Coffee page, which you can find here.☕️ Thank you to all those who have already contributed.

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I’ve written a number of times before about the galloping decline in the capacity of the modern state and the political system, and for that matter of organisations outside government and in the private sector as well. This is becoming a theme: Yves Smith in Naked Capitalism has written and hosted a number of articles and discussions on the subject, as has John Michael Greer on his Ecosophia blog. But rather than just having another moan, I want to dig into the question, not simply of why this incapacity exists, but where it ultimately comes from, and why it seems that institutions just don’t care any more about their inability to get anything done.

In historical terms, this decline in capacity, never mind the total indifference with which it is viewed, seems extraordinary. The growth of civilisation as we know it is intimately connected with the growth in the capacity of the state and its institutions. And even today, the same western governments that are increasingly incapable of threading a needle unaided, are full of ideas for “increasing government capacity” in the Third World,  promoting “accountability,” “transparency,” fighting “corruption” and establishing “good governance,” even as they show themselves unable to govern their way out of a wet paper bag at home. What on earth is going on here?

Until very recently, the growth in government and institutional capability was considered essential and indispensable: the modern world was inconceivable without it. As an exercise, consider a manual labourer or farm hand born in, say, 1850. Try to explain to this person that a distant descendant, born a century later, would grow up in a world where the vast majority of children survived into adulthood, where houses had clean running water and proper sewage, where child labour was banned, where legislation had massively reduced working hours and deaths and injuries at work, where education was free at all levels if you had the ability, and everybody had the right to vote. You would instantly have been dismissed as a political fantasist.

Now note that this is not a list of high-tech developments. Yes, motor cars, train services, aircraft, telephones, televisions and so forth made a huge difference to peoples’ lives (and most of them required government involvement even if originated by others) but the really important developments came essentially out of increasing institutional capacity and political will. Installing drains was not technically complex. Universal education was a matter of political will and the setting up of institutions. Public health has always been a low-tech business. Yet in most western countries, we see that the simple basics of life stopped getting better some time ago, and are now actually getting worse. Yet resources are not always the problem. Computers are everywhere in schools today, but, in spite of the fever-dreams of technology advocates, schoolchildren are much less well educated than they were fifty years ago. Insiders in most western countries say that the problem with health services is often not lack of money as such, but lack of competence and capacity, and lack of the right people and resources in the right places. Simply put, and as horribly demonstrated during the height of the Covid epidemic, western governments no longer know how to do things, and technology tends to make this capacity problem worse, not better.

Yet governments give no real sign that they understand this. A catastrophic failure of capacity is dealt with by denying that it happened, setting up an enquiry, relativising the problem, blaming others and forcing a few resignations. A typical response is that of Macron’s government during the height of the Covid crisis: OK, we may not be great but look, many other countries are worse! You could be forgiven for feeling that governments today are incapable of distinguishing between fantasy and reality. In a sense, and as we shall see, perhaps they are.

This is not, of course, to say that governments literally do nothing. Indeed, politicians and their increasingly-numerous hangers-on have never been more active. Theirs is a seven day a week, 24-hour per day existence, and politics has now become an all-consuming way of life, rather than a job. It seems incredible now that, fifty years ago, Ted Heath as British Prime Minister could get away from time to time to indulge his hobby of ocean racing. Now, politicians scarcely seem to sleep: but in that case, why don’t they do anything useful with their time?

What they do, of course, is to talk: incessantly, vacuously and repetitively. Politics these days is about Being Someone, not Doing Something. Talking about things is the same as doing them, in fact it’s more attractive because it’s easier. But why?

Well, you can point to a number of practical reasons. The creation of an amorphous, unitary political system, that I call The Party, with its vicious internal feuds but ultimately the same broad set of beliefs, has pretty much monopolised the political space. Whilst it might be nice to win, it’s not worth the risk of advocating, let alone pursuing, heterodox ideas, and being branded a “populist” for enquiring what it is that the electorate actually wants. In such a situation, no faction of the Party has anything to gain by making promises of change, still less carrying them out. As in 1984, the Inner Party seeks to convince the people, and even members of the Outer Party, that things will never change, and never improve. Protest and agitation are thus pointless.

That’s part of the answer. It’s also true that the Internet and social media have encouraged the endless bombardment of complaints and demands that characterise politics today. Yet in reality the vast majority of the western electorate use social media sparingly, if at all, and generally for professional and family or community reasons, so its actual influence is less than we might think. On the other hand, widespread deregulation of television from the 1980s progressively created a monster requiring to be fed with a never-ending diet controversy and scandal, turning trivia and even pure imagination into news stories of their own. And notice again that that was the result of political decisions, not some ineluctable advance of technology.

And again, the great majority of the Professional and Managerial Caste  (PMC) is in the Outer Party, desperate to make it into the Inner Party, with its salaries, its security and its status. The way to do that is not competence—you can always hire competence—but through ideological purity. The last thing you want to do is to acquire a reputation as an independent (let alone “difficult”) thinker, so the best means of career advancement is to attach yourselves to initiatives which are purely ideological, and so cannot fail in practice, because there is no practice.

But it’s more than that. After all, politics is dominated these days by performance, rather than action, to a degree unthinkable in earlier times. Now “performance” and “performative speech” have generally been understood as actions or speech which lead somewhere. So “I sentence you to life imprisonment” said by a judge or “Britain is now at war with Germany” said by the Prime Minister in 1939 are performative speech because they lead to defined actions. I want to widen this concept a bit to include all performance activity as practised today, taking into account that much speech and activity appears to involve actual consequences, but in fact does not do so. It is just a sophisticated game, a performance which shows how virtuous and right-thinking you are. It is a statement of what you Are, not what you are doing or intend to Do.

It would take a very long essay just to unpack that last paragraph, and I could give literally dozens of examples. But let me give just a very few, contrasted ones to show what I mean. Let’s assume that your organisation decides that it has “zero tolerance for racism.” Fine, what does that mean? Well, it means nothing more than “we are virtuous people.” (It’s also a way of saying “we are intolerant people” which might not be quite the message you want to convey, but never mind.) It doesn’t require you to Do anything practical. Since “racism” is simply an ideological insult, and must be distinguished, for example, from racial discrimination, which is a real phenomenon, a whole series of statements and performative actions can be argued to be “fighting racism”: putting up posters, cancelling lecturers, burning books, promoting people of the right skin colour, shouting down political enemies. All this, of course, is instead of dealing with any actual problems of racial discrimination that may exist. But once more, the purpose is really just to say “we are good people.”

So when governments or politicians announce “initiatives,” ask yourself what they actually contain, and whether any practical action is likely to result from them. In most cases, the answer is no. Even when there is the promise of some action attached (control of immigration for example) the purpose is usually to make a statement about the kind of government you are. The actual practical  consequences don’t matter that much. It’s even easier when political figures want to oppose things, because the opposition does not have to be practical: it’s enough to say “X is against our norms and values.” Back in the 1980s, when uncontrolled immigration was first starting to be an issue, the then French Prime Minister Michel Rocard, protested that France could not deal with “all the misery of the world.” He was furiously abused for this, as was Emmanuel Macron when he repeated the remark in 2017, not on the grounds that what they said was pragmatically untrue (since it obviously was true) but rather that they had said the wrong thing, and so undermined France’s perceived proud status as a land of refuge for the oppressed.  Of course it would be reasonable to sit these opponents down in front of a panel of experts and to ask them how and by precisely what steps they believed that one country could deal with all the problems of the world, but that would probably be considered unfair.

That is a good example of “Being” an example to the rest of the world, rather than “Doing” anything. The key distinction is that it is not necessary to Do anything to claim a certain status: it exists existentially, as it were, and affirmatively. It does not have to be gained, it just is. So many years ago, an African friend of mine at a conference in Ottawa was surprised to be given a pack of papers in a folder with, inscribed on the front, “Canada: a moral superpower.” The motto was repeated elsewhere. In spite of diligent enquiries, he was unable to find out what Canada had done, or was doing, to deserve this status, or even how such a status could be shown objectively to exist. Around the same time, the Labour Party of Mr Blair, came to power in the UK, and quickly became the ultimate symbol of the generational change from governments that did things to governments that said things, as exemplified by the fact that the second-most important person in the country was Blair’s Communications Chief, Alastair Campbell. And quite quickly, the government began to tell people that it wanted Britain "to be a force for good in the world.” Now clearly this is better than being a force for evil, but note that the formulation is about “Being” and not “Doing.” It is, once again, an existential status, derived from the asserted virtue of British actions, not from any practical achievements as such.

But these kinds of statements, divorced from any practical action, have now become the norm in politics. Reality now consists of media statements, press conferences, tweets, arguments on television, ceremonies and empty gestures. But because the implied audience is not the voters and the citizens, but your rivals in the Outer Party, and your superiors in the Inner Party, this disconnection doesn’t actually matter. Thus, the way to success in Blair’s Britain, for government officials as well as politicians, was to understand and act on “what Tony wants,” and so look for opportunities to emphasise your competitive ideological purity.

For example, it’s often argued that minority communities are poorer and less successful than majority ones, and this is because of blah blah structural racism blah blah. But in fact, most of these communities are poor because they consist largely of recent immigrants. In France, for example, there are very large numbers of Afghan and Chechen immigrants. In general, they arrive not speaking French (a large proportion are illiterate), with no marketable skills, and often in large family groups scarred by conflict. A thirteen-year old Afghan teenager arriving in France will get a year of language training from an overworked and increasingly desperate group of foreign language teachers with perhaps a dozen nationalities to cope with, before being released into the school system for a couple of years, unable to follow lessons and leaving with no useful skills whatever. Professional possibilities thereafter are largely limited to unskilled labour or petty crime. (To deliver takeaway food, you have to be able to read.) Now a sensible policy might involve either or both of strict immigration control, and massive resources devoted to assimilation into French society, language and culture. Neither is done, because controls are “against our traditions,” and assimilation implies that we think the immigrants are culturally inferior, and we don’t want people to believe that about us. We don’t do Doing, after all, we do Being.

So Being, but not Doing, isn’t just a question of capacity, it’s also a question of will, or just of plain lack of interest. It’s not that just striking poses and being “who we are” is easier, it’s also as much as our current political class is prepared to do. Why? Well, here are a few ideas.

The western political class is now overwhelmingly made up of university graduates. Figures vary, but in most countries 70-80% of politicians have university degrees, and among younger politicians, this can rise to nearly 100%. Moreover, such people have very often completed higher degrees at prestigious international institutions. This means that many come into politics, after a few years as a research assistant, NGO flunky or party hack, with essentially the experience of the politics of universities and small organisations. It seems to be a rule of nature that in politics the less important the issues the more violent, intolerant and personalised are the arguments. (This is why academic politics is often so unattractively vicious.) Moreover, politics in such contexts is essentially about personalities, egos and ideology. Young people in such environments seldom have any real importance or responsibility, and indeed aspiring youthful politicians will generally avoid getting elected to anything with real consequences, in favour of positions that allow them to be visible. Student political organisations are generally tiny, elitist and hopelessly divided. In France for example, barely 5% of students are members of all the Syndicats combined, yet their leaders, who spend most of their time in bitter ideological disputes with each other, are solemnly sought out by the media to pronounce on questions of education, as though their opinions actually mattered. You achieve power in such organisations not by competence (since by and large you have nothing practical to do) but through ideological purity, and by convincing tiny electorates that you are more ideologically pure than the other candidates. Aspiring politicians begin, in other words, as they plan to go on.

A second influence is the role of the “study” of Commerce and Management, and to some extent Economics, which aspiring politicians now feel they have to add to their CVs. So business schools proliferate throughout the world, as faculties of theology once did, to provide entry to a career, but without the intellectual rigour and practical utility that theological faculties at least brought. But what they do provide is formulas that short-circuit knowledge and experience, pre-cooked methodologies for dealing with any question on any issue, and a discourse which is international, mostly in English, and empty of any real content and value. The influence of this in politics today is everywhere to see. In the past, “practical businessmen” who tried to enter politics (often disastrously) could at least claim to have founded and run businesses, managed large numbers of people and taken responsibility. These days, business schools mainly teach personal advancement through knowing what to think and say, and above all by presenting themselves and the results of their work in the best possible light. Much of the work of managers today consists, notoriously, in the manipulation of numbers, for which they are never subsequently required to account. All that matters is the effect on the share price and their bonuses. What is important is not what the company is, still less what it does, but rather what it appears to be. (In this climate, it is unsurprising that government statistics on questions of importance today rarely bear any relationship to reality, and indeed are often not intended to be taken seriously.) And trainee managers are taught today about how to manage their image, how to attract patronage and how to achieve advancement: everything, indeed, except how to do a good job. By the time they enter politics they are thus well prepared.

The private sector has carried out what is called “editorial advertising” for decades now, although generally without any measurable effect on sales or profits. But glossy presentations of “this is us” and “who we are” have inflated the egos of managers and won awards for advertising agencies, so it’s not all wasted. (Naturally, the same mania for talking about one’s ego has now invaded politics.) In reality, the only mission statement that a private company needs is to provide goods or services that people want to buy, at prices they are prepared to pay. But a new generation of managers, all passing through on the way to a better job, somehow feels constrained to witter on about diversity and social responsibility, as though anyone cared. This tendency has increasingly come to dominate politics as well, often creating what seems to be a kind of parallel reality, where what happens in the media and what happens on the ground have drifted irretrievably apart. This was evident in many episodes of the mishandling of the Covid crisis. For example, reference to the (undisputed) fact that the epidemic began in China, and proposals to ban flights from that part of the world, were greeted with hysterical political and PMC opposition, because that would have been to “stigmatise” the Chinese. Actual issues of life and death seemed to belong to a separate reality, pushed to one side by the proud desire to show how tolerant and anti-racist our society was. In business, such disconnects often don’t matter: the fact that a company which preaches social responsibility is making use of child labour may make a few paragraphs on a media site, and will soon be forgotten. But as we have seen, playing politics the same way can be lethal.

Another influence, curiously enough, is the survival of certain Christian ways of thinking long after the formal influence of religion has declined. (The West is, whatever may be said, still fundamentally marked by its Christian heritage, and will be for some time yet.) Early Christianity was famously riven by bitter doctrinal disputes about what was it was necessary to believe to attain salvation. The dominant view over many centuries was that poor humans, guilty of Original Sin, and incapable of performing works that would themselves merit salvation, had to rely on the ineffable grace of God and salvation by faith. (OK, I know, I’m skipping over entire libraries of books in this paragraph.) The Church slid backwards sometimes into support for the idea of salvation through works, but the stern doctrine that Christianity was about Being, not Doing, remained dominant. Thus, the greatest sins, the only really important ones, were sins of the mind, which is why Pride was at the head of most of the lists of sins you find in works of medieval theology. It was, of course, the Reformation that dragged a large part of the Christian world definitively in this direction, as Luther, Calvin and their followers argued that the grace of God, handed out through a personal relationship with the divine, and not subject to intermediation by a corrupt Church, was the foundation of all religion. Needless to say, this way of thinking was very attractive to the rising middle classes, who adopted it as they later adopted the related doctrines of political and economic Liberalism.

However, the paradox quickly arose (as it had with millennialist movements earlier) that if I am already Saved, there is no reason why I should behave well, since nothing I Do can affect my Saved status. This paradox was resolved by the injunction that it was necessary to demonstrate just how Saved you were by practical actions, secure in the consciousness of your higher moral status. So Doing, in this context, meant simply demonstrating this higher moral status to others, with actions which were not open to question or criticism: they were just Right. (In practice, of course, such a society would have been completely anarchic, so paradoxically, extreme Protestant communities like Calvin’s Geneva came to resemble collective ideological police states: a bit like a modern American university without the sports teams.)  Once the idea that what really mattered was in your head and not in your actions gained real traction, it proved immensely persistent in all sorts of ways. It’s been argued, for example, that a good Marxist of the 1930s had to accept Stalin’s purges, without necessarily supporting them, because history was working itself out in a particular way, and, as long as you retained faith in the ultimate destination, road-bumps along the way just had to be accepted. The important thing was what Communism Was, not what it Did.

At its worst, in both its religious and subsequent secular guises, this way of thinking produces a narrow, self-righteous and intolerant form of behaviour, that prizes purity of belief above all, and sees actions less as good things to do in their on right, and more as proofs of how virtuous you are. At least it can be said that in the nineteenth century, fervent evangelists not only managed to keep the worst excesses of Liberalism under control, but actually did a great deal of objective good, from abolishing the slave trade to taking ten-year old children out of mines. But their successors today follow a kind of Degenerate Secular Calvinism, where politicians and pundits compete with each other to show that they are better people because their hearts and their beliefs are purer, and castigate others whose beliefs are in some way defective.

Finally, it shouldn’t be thought that the triumph of Being over Doing in our society is limited to politicians and their hangers on. It’s gone a lot further than that. Several generations of pundits now have earned a good living simply by striking poses of moral superiority and condemning as morally deficient anyone who does not share their views. It’s deeply ironic in fact, the Church no longer feels capable of making important pronouncements on moral issues, whereas people who once went to a lecture on Kant’s ethics feel no compunction about doing so, because after all they are Good People, and lecturing others makes them feel superior to the rest of us.

Such people, or at least the pundit faction of them, are like the Saved Calvinists of Geneva: their legitimacy does not have to be earned, it comes from who and what they are, not how much they know, or what they have experienced. From the comfort of their studies they can instruct governments to wage war, accept refugees, vote this way or that, support this or that side in a conflict, justified not by anything they have Done, but simply by what they Are.

You find examples everywhere. One of my favourites is the pose of Questioner of the Conventional Wisdom. Such people do, in fact, accept nearly all of the Conventional Wisdom, and can be quite aggressive when parts of it that they do subscribe to are questioned. But one sure way to establish yourself as a pundit, or just as a well-known commenter on an internet site, is to sing the “only questioning the conventional wisdom” song, whether it’s about the Holocaust, the assassination of JFK, the Apollo Moon landings, the destruction of the Twin Towers, the latest contested election somewhere, or anything else you like. You don’t need to know anything—to have Done any study or research —rather, what you Are, the heroic questioner of the conventional wisdom, gives you all the status you think you need.

Likewise, if you have an iPhone you can, overnight, “become” a Citizen Journalist. Now for all that I’m often critical of journalists, the good ones I’ve met have possessed a combination of training, experience, analytical rigour and mundane but important professional skills. But in reality, I’d trust a Citizen Journalist as far as I would trust a citizen brain surgeon, except the latter would probably kill fewer people. I will believe citizen journalists are more than propagandists when they publish carefully checked and properly presented material which does not help the side they support. I expect to have to wait a long time: after all, it’s what they Are, that matters, not what they Do, and how well they do it.

We therefor have a political class, as well as a PMC and their hangers on, who are not only incapable of doing very much, but feel no need to, either. They live in a world where not just the tangible rewards, but also the inner satisfaction of being a Good Person, come not from what you Do, but what you Are. And being a Good Person, one of the Elect, justified by faith and not by works, gives you that maddening sense of superiority, and that insufferable tendency to lecture others, that originates ultimately from certain strands of Christianity and its secular derivatives. Notice in particular that such a person sees no requirement to themselves Do anything: they are already Saved. But on the other hand that status gives them the right to harangue and lecture the wicked and the preterite. This, I’m convinced, is why current political elites can only lecture and insult ordinary people, rather than rationally trying to argue for their votes. Jesus could have taught them a thing or two. (In that context, I’ve always argued that “we” is one of the most dangerous and treacherous words in politics: next time somebody tells you that “we must …” ask them what precise personal contribution they are intending to make.)

There’s one small difficulty with taking a model derived from religious bigotry and the certainty of an afterlife, and applying it to the messy world of modern western electoral politics: the two have absolutely no point of contact with each other. Ordinary voters living ordinary lives have ordinary concerns, which they reasonably expect politicians to respond to. But these days, their concerns are treated as unreasonable and even stupid: they may feel the economy is getting worse, that they can’t feed their families, that their standard of living is falling every year, but that’s because they are too stupid to read and understand the official statistics that show how much better life is getting. In other words, they are the preterite, the non-Elect, condemned to outer darkness and beyond help.

Nothing is more effective as a method for suppressing this popular criticism and demands for a decent life than fake moral indignation. Take a couple of examples from recent experience. Your fifteen year-old daughter comes home from school in tears because she’s been pursued around the playground by groups of boys calling her a prostitute for wearing a skirt. Complaints to the teacher produce a resigned shrug. This is happening increasingly and nothing can be done. Complaints to the school principal are similarly ineffective: schools have been told not to “make waves” over such incidents, because they could be exploited by Islamophobes and helped to the strengthen the extreme Right. In theory, this kind of behaviour is a criminal offence, but the local commissariat will tell you they do not investigate such reports because racism. We are a country that proudly fights Racism and Islamophobia. That’s what We Are, and we must not Do anything that put that status in question. Send your daughter to school wearing jeans.

Likewise, in many cities in Europe, town centres are deserted late in the evening because of gang violence and aggressive begging mixed with theft. Restaurants are closing, suppliers of food and drink are going bankrupt and jobs are disappearing. But actually, it’s the fault of stupid people like you and me who are influenced by the fear of crime (only two people have actually been murdered outside restaurants this month!) and by the extreme Right who are spreading lies as part of their anti-immigrant hate propaganda. Cracking down on such crime would require us to behave in ways that are Not Us, so you’ll just have to put up with it.

Even quite unrelated concerns can somehow be assimilated to this logic. Fed up with big cities? Want to live in a small community where you know your neighbours? Just a case of disguised racism! Want to live in a world of secure jobs and families? You’re an idiot who doesn’t understand the New Dispensation! When in doubt, Insult.

Yet one of the most tenacious but least appreciated rules of politics is that nothing lasts for ever, and everything ultimately produces a reaction. The longer and more extreme the swing of the pendulum in one direction, the more violent is usually the reaction. So under normal circumstances, groups of mainstream politicians in various countries would have appeared by now, and started arguing the need to take the concerns of ordinary people into account. The fact that this isn’t happening is the single most disturbing political development of our times: even the Soviet Communist Party in its last years displayed more flexibility than the current political systems of the West. Or perhaps, as I sometimes wonder, the Party itself has become discouraged and disgusted with itself, maybe the strain of relentless ideological conformity is beginning to be too much and perhaps it’s in the process of committing collective suicide, and leaving the future to others. That’s fine as far as it goes, but who are the others, and where are they?