Ill Fares the Land

by Tony Judt

  A NEW MORAL NARRATIVE?

  “Greek ethical thought rested on an objective teleology of human nature, believing that there were facts about man and his place in the world which determined, in a way discoverable to reason, that he was meant to lead a co-operative and ordered life. Some version of this belief has been held by most ethical outlooks subsequently; we are perhaps more conscious now of having to do without it than anyone has been since some fifth-century Sophists first doubted it.”

  —BERNARD WILLIAMS

  The Left has failed to respond effectively to the financial crisis of 2008—and more generally to the shift away from the state and towards the market over the past three decades. Shorn of a story to tell, social democrats and their liberal and Democratic fellows have been on the defensive for a generation, apologizing for their own policies and altogether unconvincing when it comes to criticizing those of their opponents. Even when their programs are popular, they have trouble defending them against charges of budgetary incontinence or governmental interference.

  So what is to be done? What sort of political or moral framework can the Left propose to explain its objectives and justify its goals? There is no longer a place for the old-style master narrative: the all-embracing theory of everything. Nor can we retreat to religion: whatever we think of accounts of God’s purposes and His expectations of men, the fact is that we cannot hope to rediscover the kingdom of faith. In the developed world especially, there are fewer and fewer people for whom religion is either a necessary or sufficient motive for public or private action.

  Conversely, the fact that many in the West would be perplexed to learn that a public policy was being justified on theological grounds should not blind us to the importance of moral purpose in human affairs. Debates about war, abortion, euthanasia, torture; disputes over public expenditure on health or education: these and so much else are instinctively couched in terms that draw quite directly on traditional religious or philosophical writings, even if these are unfamiliar to contemporary commentators.

  It is the gap between the inherently ethical nature of public decision-making and the utilitarian quality of contemporary political debate that accounts for the lack of trust felt towards politics and politicians. Liberals are too quick to mock the bland ethical nostrums of religious leaders, contrasting them with the complexity and seduction of modern life. The remarkable appeal of the late Pope John Paul II to young people inside and outside the Catholic faith should give us pause: humans need a language in which to express their moral instincts.

  To put it slightly differently: even if we concede that there is no higher purpose to life, we need to ascribe meaning to our actions in a way that transcends them. Merely asserting that something is or is not in our material interest will not satisfy most of us most of the time. To convince others that something is right or wrong we need a language of ends, not means. We don’t have to believe that our objectives are poised to succeed. But we do need to be able to believe in them.

  Political skepticism is the source of so many of our dilemmas. Even if free markets worked as advertised, it would be hard to claim that they constituted a sufficient basis for the well-lived life. So what precisely is it that we find lacking in unrestrained financial capitalism, or ‘commercial society’ as the 18th century had it? What do we find instinctively amiss in our present arrangements and what can we do about them? What is it that offends our sense of propriety when faced with unfettered lobbying by the wealthy at the expense of everyone else? What have we lost?

  We are all children of the Greeks. We intuitively grasp the need for a sense of moral direction: it is not necessary to be familiar with Socrates to feel that the unexamined life is not worth much. Natural Aristotelians, we assume that a just society is one in which justice is habitually practiced; a good society one in which people behave well. But in order for such an implicitly circular account to convince, we need to agree on the meaning of ‘just’ or ‘well’.

  For Aristotle and his successors, the substance of justice or goodness was as much a function of convention as of definition. Like pornography, these attributes might be impossible to define but you knew them when you saw them. The attractions of a ‘reasonable’ level of wealth, an ‘acceptable’ compromise, a just or good resolution were self-evident. The avoidance of extremes was a moral virtue in its own right, as well as a condition of political stability. However, the idea of moderation—so familiar to generations of moralists—is difficult to articulate today. Big is not always better, more not always desirable; but we are discouraged from expressing the thought.

  One source of our confusion may be a blurring of the distinction between law and justice. In the US especially, so long as a practice is not illegal we find it hard to define its shortcomings. The notion of ‘prudence’ eludes us: the idea that it is imprudent as well as improper for Goldman Sachs to distribute billions of dollars in bonuses less than a year after benefiting from taxpayer largesse would have been self-evident to men of the Scottish Enlightenment, just as it would to the classical philosophers. ‘Imprudence’ in this respect would have been as reprehensible as financial chicanery: not least for the risks to which it exposed the community at large.

  It was the distinctive achievement of the Enlightenment to weld classical moral categories to a secularized vision of human improvement: in a well-ordered society, men would not just live well but strive to live better than in the past. The idea of progress entered the ethical lexicon and dominated it for much of the ensuing two centuries. We hear echoes of this innocent optimism even today, when Americans speak enthusiastically of ‘reinventing’ themselves. But with the exception of the hard sciences, is ‘progress’ still a credible account of the world we inhabit?

  The Enlightenment vision—with or without God as its first mover and moral arbiter—no longer convinces: we need reasons to choose one policy or set of policies over another. What we lack is a moral narrative: an internally coherent account that ascribes purpose to our actions in a way that transcends them. But what of the view that politics is the art of the possible and morality is something, in the words of the former British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, best left to Archbishops? Are not all normative propositions—if taken seriously—potentially intolerant? Don’t we have to start from what we have, rather than from abstract first principles?

  Collective purposes may contain competing objectives. Indeed, any truly open society will want to embrace them: freedom and equality are the most obvious—and we are all by now familiar with the tension between wealth creation and environmental protection. Some sort of mutual restraint will be required if we are to take seriously all of our desires: this is a truism for any consensual system. But it speaks volumes to the degradation of public life that it sounds so idealistic today.

  Idealistic and naïve: who now believes in such shared ideals? But someone has to take responsibility for what Jan Patočka called the ‘Soul of the City’. It cannot indefinitely be substituted with a story of endless economic growth. Abundance (as Daniel Bell once observed) is the American substitute for socialism. But is that the best we can do?

  WHAT DO WE WANT?

  “My aim in life is to make life pleasanter for this great majority; I do not care if it becomes in the process less pleasant for the well to do minority.”

  —JOSEPH CHAMBERLAIN

  Of all the competing and only partially reconcilable ends that we might seek, the reduction of inequality must come first. Under conditions of endemic inequality, all other desirable goals become hard to achieve. Whether in Delhi or Detroit, the poor and the permanently underprivileged cannot expect justice. They cannot secure medical treatment and their lives are accordingly reduced in length and potential. They cannot get a good education, and without that they cannot hope for even minimally secure employment—much less participation in the culture and civilization of their society.

  In this sense, unequal access to resources of every sort—from rights to water—is the sta
rting point of any truly progressive critique of the world. But inequality is not just a technical problem. It illustrates and exacerbates the loss of social cohesion—the sense of living in a series of gated communities whose chief purpose is to keep out other people (less fortunate than ourselves) and confine our advantages to ourselves and our families: the pathology of the age and the greatest threat to the health of any democracy.

  If we remain grotesquely unequal, we shall lose all sense of fraternity: and fraternity, for all its fatuity as a political objective, turns out to be the necessary condition of politics itself. The inculcation of a sense of common purpose and mutual dependence has long been regarded as the linchpin of any community. Acting together for a common purpose is the source of enormous satisfaction, in everything from amateur sports to professional armies. In this sense, we have always known that inequality is not just morally troubling: it is inefficient .

  The corrosive consequences of envy and resentment that arise in visibly unequal societies would be significantly mitigated under more equal conditions: the prison population of egalitarian countries bears witness to this likelihood. A less stratified population is also a better educated one: increasing opportunity for those at the bottom does nothing to reduce the prospects for those already well-placed. And better educated populations not only lead better lives, they adapt faster and at less cost to disruptive technical change.

  There is quite a lot of evidence that even those who do well in unequal societies would be happier if the gap separating them from the majority of their fellow citizens were significantly reduced. They would certainly be more secure. But there is more to it than mere self-interest: living in close proximity to people whose condition constitutes a standing ethical rebuke is a source of discomfort even for the wealthy.

  Selfishness is uncomfortable even for the selfish. Hence the rise of gated communities: the privileged don’t like to be reminded of their privileges—if these carry morally dubious connotations. To be sure, it might be argued that after three decades of inculcated self-regard, young people in the United States and elsewhere are now immune to such sensitivities. But I do not believe this is the case. The perennial desire of youth to do something ‘useful’ or ‘good’ speaks to an instinct that we have not succeeded in repressing. Not, however, for lack of trying: why else have universities seen fit to establish ‘business schools’ for undergraduates?

  The time has come to reverse this trend. In post-religious societies like our own, where most people find meaning and satisfaction in secular objectives, it is only by indulging what Adam Smith called our ‘benevolent instincts’ and reversing our selfish desires that we can “. . . produce among mankind that harmony of sentiments and passions in which consists their whole race and propriety.”28

  CHAPTER SIX

  The Shape of Things to Come

  “The success of postwar democracy rests on the equilibrium between production and redistribution, regulated by the state. With globalization, this equilibrium is broken. Capital has become mobile: production has moved beyond national borders, and thus outside the remit of state redistribution . . . Growth would oppose redistribution; the virtuous circle would become the vicious circle.”

  —DOMINIQUE STRAUSS-KAHN

  In the famous opening paragraph of his 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Karl Marx observes that all facts and personages of importance in world history occur twice: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce. There is much to be said for this view, but it does not exclude the possibility that even tragedies may repeat themselves. Western commentators who celebrated the defeat of Communism confidently anticipated an era of peace and freedom. We should have known better.

  GLOBALIZATION

  “It is in the nature of things, that a state which subsists upon a revenue furnished by other countries must be infinitely more exposed to all the accidents of time and chance than one which produces its own.”

  —THOMAS MALTHUS

  Even economies have histories. The last great era of internationalization—‘globalization’ avant le mot—took place in the imperial decades preceding World War I. It was broadly assumed at the time, much as it is today, that ‘we’ (Great Britain, Western Europe, the United States) were poised on the threshold of an unprecedented age of growth and stability. International war appeared quite literally unthinkable. Not only did the great powers have every interest in the preservation of peace; war, after decades of industrialization and great advances in armaments technology, would be unspeakably destructive and intolerably expensive. No rational state or politician could possibly desire it.

  Moreover, by 1914—thanks to new forms of communication, transport and exchange -the petty national quarrels and boundary disputes of empires and aspirant nations appeared absurd and anachronistic. It made no economic sense to speak of breaking up the Austrian Empire, for example: with its industrial heartland in Bohemia, its capital in Vienna and its labor force drawing on immigrants from all over central and southeastern Europe, the Empire was living evidence of the internationalization of modern economic life. No one, surely, would wish to impoverish all the constituent parts of such a natural unit merely in the name of nationalist dogma. International markets had displaced the nation-state as the primary units of human activity.

  Anyone seeking an account of the tremendous self-confidence of the men of pre-1914 Europe can do no better than read Keynes’s Economic Consequences of the Peace: a summary of the illusions of a world on the edge of catastrophe, written in the aftermath of the war that was to put an end to all such irenic fancies for the next fifty years. As Keynes reminds us, “. . . the internationalisation [of social and economic life] was nearly complete in practice.”29 To invoke a term not yet in use, the world seemed flat.

  This precedent should make us cautious. The first age of globalization came to a shuddering halt. Thanks to the Great War and its aftermath, economic growth in Europe would not recover its 1913 levels until well into the 1950s. The apparently unstoppable logic of economics was trumped by the rise of new nation-states, mutually antagonistic and politically unstable. Great empires—the Russian, the Austrian, the Turkish, the German and eventually the British—all collapsed. Only the United States stood to gain from this international cataclysm: and even the US did not profit from its newfound hegemony until nearly thirty years after the end of the war that brought it about.

  The optimism of the Edwardians was replaced by an enduring and gnawing insecurity. The gap between the illusions of the Gilded Age and the realities of the next four decades was filled by economic retrenchment, political demagogy and unbroken international conflict. By 1945, there was a universal “craving for security” (Keynes), addressed by the provision of public services and social safety nets incorporated into postwar systems of governance from Washington to Prague. The very term “social security”—adapted by Keynes from its new American usage—became a universal shorthand for prophylactic institutions designed to avert any return to the interwar catastrophe.

  Today, it is as though the 20th century never happened. We have been swept up into a new master narrative of “integrated global capitalism”, economic growth and indefinite productivity gains. Like earlier narratives of endless improvement, the story of globalization combines an evaluative mantra (“growth is good”) with the presumption of inevitability: globalization is with us to stay, a natural process rather than a human choice. The ineluctable dynamic of global economic competition and integration has become the illusion of the age. As Margaret Thatcher once put it: There Is No Alternative.

  We should be wary of such claims. ‘Globalization’ is an updating of the high modernist faith in technology and rational management which marked the enthusiasms of the postwar decades. Like them, it implicitly excludes politics as an arena of choice: systems of economic relationships are, as the 18th century physiocrats used to assert, laid down by nature. Once they have been identified and correctly understood, it remains to us only to live according to
their laws.

  However, it is not true that an increasingly globalized economy tends to the equalization of wealth—a defense of globalization offered by its more liberal admirers. While inequalities do indeed become less marked between countries, disparities of wealth and poverty within countries actually increased. Moreover, sustained economic expansion in itself guarantees neither equality nor prosperity; it is not even a reliable source of economic development.

  After decades of rapid growth, India’s per capita GDP in 2006 ($728) remained only slightly above that of sub-Saharan Africa, while on the UN Human Development Index—an aggregate calculus of social and economic indicators—the country ranked some seventy places below Cuba and Mexico, not to speak of fully developed economies. As for modernization: despite its enthusiastic and much-touted participation in the globalized economy of high technology industry and services, just 1.3 million of India’s 400 million workers had jobs in the ‘new economy’. To say the least, the benefits of globalization take an extraordinarily long time to trickle down.30

  Moreover, we have no good reason to suppose that economic globalization translates smoothly into political freedom. The opening up of China and other Asian economies has merely shifted industrial production from high wage to low wage regions. Furthermore, China (like many other developing countries) is not just a low wage country—it is also and above all a ‘low rights’ country. And it is the absence of rights which keeps wages down and will continue to do so for some time—meanwhile depressing the rights of workers in countries with which China competes. Chinese capitalism, far from liberalizing the condition of the masses, further contributes to their repression.