There is always a “chink in the armor”. Somewhere there is always at least some leeway in any apparent grid-lock of society, which in turn opens up new possible developments somewhere else. There is always a promise of further development.
We are looking to create new contexts, new historical situations where what was impossible before now becomes possible. This is, needless to say, a dynamic process in which we need to let the different forms of development support each other.
The rest of this book is devoted to finding such promises. We’ll squeeze in developmental leaps where people didn’t think they were possible—so that we can make possible the transition to a metamodern society; one that is fit for the global, digital age.
For ardent readers: If you want to see how game change relates to some classical political philosophers, consult this footnote. [26] And, if you wish to examine some of the many levers you can pull to effect game change, read Appendix C, “Effecting Game Change”.
Thus: Let go of game denial and game acceptance—and go for game change. The idea is not to eradicate competition from life, but to transform and refine the nature of competition in all aspects of life: on the labor market, in work culture, in the political deliberations and elections, in the games of love, sex and family, in peer groups and in research and education.
So again—don’t hate the player.
And don’t hate the game, either.
We need to love the game, learn to play it.
And change its rules.
Because we love the players.
Chapter 3:
HISTORY’S DIRECTION
“Without order, nothing exists,
Without chaos, nothing evolves.”
—From the rap text to Heavy Metal Kings,
by Jedi Mind Tricks.
In this chapter we’re going to catch the big drift of how human societies develop—more specifically, how the state develops: how order emerges. Obviously, this can hardly be done in any extensive manner in just a single chapter. Instead, what we’re getting at here is a certain pattern relevant to the ensuing argument of this book: the increasing intimacy of control .
The reason we need to understand this development is that the metamodern politics I propose is a step in a historical evolution which has been unfolding for centuries. And, again, there is a logic to it. Counter-intuitive as it may sound to many, more complex societies need more intimate mechanisms of control. This is because greater volumes of more complex human agencies and interactions are coordinated as society progresses to more advanced stages. You cannot reverse this trend without paying a very high price; namely, disorder and disintegration. Rather, the increasing intimacy of control must be made fair, balanced and transparent—as you will see.
It might be a bit heavier for readers not accustomed to studying history. But it’s no less important. Take a breath of fresh air and get yourself a drink of fresh water (or something a tad stronger if that’s your preference).
A Developmental View of Order
For a more overarching view of historical development, you can consult my other book The 6 Hidden Patterns of History . Or, if you want a more comparative view of how polity has developed in China, India and Europe, you can take a look at Francis Fukuyama’s masterly two-volume work The Origins of Political Order (vol.1) and Political Order and Political Decay (vol.2). [27]
Fukuyama argues there are three major ingredients of a modern liberal democracy:
A meritocratic state bureaucracy (where people are loyal to society as a whole, not only to their family or clan)
Accountability of the government (with a strong civil society capable of self-organizing and sometimes resisting the power of the state)
Rule of law (i.e. that laws are upheld and the government is restrained by the same laws as everyone else)
As we see today, some countries display all three characteristics (Western democracies), some display two (Latin American countries have states and accountability but generally a weak rule of law) and some display only one (like China, which has only a strong state bureaucracy and a limited form of rule of law). And they can be developed in different sequences. In this chapter, I focus more generally on the evolution of the state and its penetration into the everyday lives of the citizenry.
The developmental view of society has gone in and out of fashion a few times over the last few centuries as political and scientific winds and currents have changed. From relatively crude and moralistic ideas of the 19th century, according to which societies evolved from “savagery” to “barbarism” to “civilization”, to the classical developmental modes of early sociology (including Marx, Comte and Weber), to the relativistic and non-judgmental anthropology of Franz Boas, Margaret Mead and Clifford Geertz, to new generations of developmentalists who have chosen more careful wordings for the developmental stages—like the anthropologist Marshall Sahlins.
Even if the study of societal development is an issue ridden with landmines and potential misunderstandings, it is hard to deny the obvious fact that societies somehow develop—if not to “higher” forms, if not “forward”, at least to later stages that are more complex, richer and form parts of larger systems of exchange.
The anthropologist Elman Service famously proposed four major stages: bands, tribes, chiefdoms and states. There is another model which I believe is far better at explaining the developmental aspects of historical change (the metamemes, as discussed in The 6 Hidden Patterns of History ). But still, Service’s model will do as a starting point for this chapter.
We are now to zoom in on the fourth and last of Service’s stages: the state (or polity), in order to make an argument that is very relevant for understanding political metamodernism, the listening society and the Nordic ideology. Specifically, I wish to introduce a simple but exceedingly pervasive rule in the development of the state: the rule of increasing intimacy of control .
This rule holds that the polity, viewed as an emergent pattern of governance among humans, keeps evolving in ways that increase the monitoring and control of human behaviors by reaching into deeper layers of the human soul and putting it under deliberate, collective control. We are looking at the development of social order. It is furthermore, I argue, this increased control that makes possible the civil liberties, human rights and liberal culture we currently enjoy. Order, freedom and equality go hand-in-hand. As with all three-part marriages, it’s not always simple; but the three need each other. I will qualify this controversial claim as we go along.
So, we will consider how the modern state has emerged in three subsequent stages: 1) the early modern state, 2) the nation state, and 3) the welfare state—and how we are now approaching the metamodern state, 4) the “listening society”. This progression can be described in many different ways, but it quite certainly follows the rule of increasing intimacy of control.
1. The Early Modern State
Depending on how we delineate and define the issue, we can trace the beginnings of “the early modern state” to different times and places. Some kind of proto-modern state has existed for at least two millennia—Qin China, in the 200s BCE, was the first fully developed example. Qin China was more similar to modern bureaucracies than its ancient Egyptian, Mesopotamian, Greek and Roman counterparts.
Still, something quite distinctive happened around the 17th century in some European countries. With the risk of being simplistic and Eurocentric, we can focus on the year 1648.
The Peace of Westphalia in 1648 ended the grim Thirty Years’ War. The war, which had raged across Europe and caused millions of deaths, triggered famines and elicited atrocities, was of course a complex and multifaceted affair. But roughly speaking, it was the result of a new order of political formations—early modern, Protestant, states—that ganged up on the old political order: the Holy R
oman Empire, the papacy and the Spanish monarchy.
The Swedes, under Gustavus Adolphus, intervened in 1630, turning the tide of the war in favor of the Protestants—and according to some sources, in the subsequent five years they destroyed up to 2,000 castles, 18,000 villages and 1,500 towns all across Germany. That’s some carnage; about a third of all Germany leveled to the ground. [28]
The Peace of Westphalia established the geopolitical influence of a number of states, notably the upstart Sweden. Most importantly, a new power balance emerged, guaranteed by the peace treaty, which replaced the old order based upon the idea of a universal, Catholic empire that knew no clear national boundaries, with that of a system of sovereign and mutually recognized nation states. No longer could one overarching power freely interfere in the domestic affairs of a foreign state. Each state now had the “right” to determine its own official religion, and religious differences were no longer considered a casus bello (an acceptable reason to declare war). The early modern state had come online.
At this point, in the 1600s, people’s everyday lives were still at a considerable distance from the kings, queens, viceroys, stadtholders and councils who ruled them, and they rarely identified with their given “nationalities”. People still spoke dialects, rather than standardized national languages, and they had relatively little to do with the state formation in their everyday lives, most still living off subsistence farming. People were yet to be enfranchised in the nation-building project to any greater degree. There were printed books, mostly Bibles, but no newspapers or any other press for the masses. Even if firearms had made knighthood less relevant, the landed elite and nobility still held distinct privileges by birthright, intriguing away around the royal courts.
Gradually, however, the state built up a stronger bureaucracy and aligned it with the social mechanisms of early capitalism and the growing merchant class. By instituting a higher degree of legal protection, granting the bourgeoisie political representation and adopting more rational fiscal policies, along with an uncompromising pursuit of mercantilist trading strategies (the practice of maximizing your own state’s share of the international market), a number of smaller and more flexible states managed to garner increasingly rapid economic growth.
This early capitalism was of course geared towards a society in which, by our present-day measures, only slow economic growth was possible, so military, colonial and mercantilist expansion remained important throughout the period. But still, some powers successfully spurred growing economies. Hence, the Netherlands, England, Denmark and Sweden became strong European powers alongside France and Spain. In the Protestant countries, literacy rose as people were expected to read bibles, which complemented the needs of the growing merchant class and the expanding bureaucracy.
Even if France took measures to embrace the new economic and bureaucratic system, its problematic power balance between the crown and the nobility proved disastrous to its economy in the long term: As the aristocracy was favored at the expense of bankers and merchants, it lead to long-term fiscal crises and eventually to the French Revolution. Even in France’s strong, absolutist bureaucracy, the attractors determined history’s course: that its ancien régime of absolutist feudal monarchy was doomed. To this day, the glory of the baroque period and the reign of Louis XIV smack of excess and vanity.
In the 1700s, Russian ruler Peter the Great, and his spiritual heir, German-born Catherine the Great, struggled to reshape Russia in the image of the Western powers. They recognized that the structure of the early modern state was distinct from, and competitively superior to, the medieval estate system. What was initially an attractor in the sense that a certain inherent logic made it likely to occur, became an explicitly recognized attractor—it caught the attention of central actors and was deliberately strived towards by forward-thinking rulers.
So in the early modern state you see a first phase of modern governance: steps are taken to increase the rule of law, optimize taxation, support and stimulate businesses, increase manufacture, ally the state to the merchant class and hence create a simple form of polity enfranchisement in broader layers of the population, establish a class of bureaucrats and simple forms of accountants who made possible a kind of “national economy”. And I have only briefly mentioned the military, which at this point played an important role by being the nexus around which e.g. Prussia and Sweden were built.
What you see, in other words, is an expansion of the level of control the state holds on people’s everyday lives. The states that manage to increase this control the most are also the ones that became dominant during the period since this penetration of everyday life increased the ability of larger groups to cooperate in more complex ways.
This does not mean that whatever king is most despotic has the greatest advantage. On the contrary, the less monolithic states and rulers become more powerful because that’s how the polity successfully manages the most information, coordinates the greatest quantity of behaviors, and enfranchises the highest number of agents. The issue at hand is to build the strongest institutions to manage such flows and to let people be productive within more complex divisions of labor. In this vein, in England, you even see the birth of modern institutions such as the Royal Society (1660), to actively and deliberately promote science, and the Bank of England (1694) to coordinate the monetary flows.
The libertarian view, and perhaps the common sense of our time, is that freedom grows as these developments unfold. But that’s really only half the picture. It is no coincidence that this period, early modernity, is where the French philosopher Michel Foucault takes off in his studies of power and control in modern society. Writing primarily in the 1960s and 70s, his important insight was to point out that control also grows as modern society progresses: that everything—from trade flows, to births and deaths, to bodies, to inner organs, to sex and sexuality, to gender, to time management, to city landscapes—becomes increasingly subjected to minute control, monitoring and standardization.
Even if Foucault is sometimes accused of being overly paranoid in his depiction of these developments, he wasn’t really talking about some deliberate conspiracy. Rather, Foucault simply showed that our common sense of increasing freedom and individuality must be seen as illusory in the grander scheme of things. Today, more than ever, we are being controlled by a multitude of sources that lie beyond our conscious consent—at a greater distance from us. These sources of control are much less tangible than our former feudal bonds.
It is not, then, the power of the king that grows, but the volume and density of power itself that increase. Not the visible authority of one person over another, but the raw capacity to shape and coordinate human bodies, actions and souls. Although Foucault never spoke in these terms, he was describing power as an emergent property of the self-organizing system that makes governance of a more complex society possible . And in that sense, power increases as the system becomes more differentiated and develops more intricate social technologies of control. The early modern state encroached upon the lives of peasants and merchants, beginning to shape them as cultural and psychological beings.
A new stage of order emerges.
2. The Nation State
The next stage of this development emerged during the 19th century in a dynamic interaction with the processes of industrial modernity: industrialization, urbanization, conscription, bureaucratization—and the growth of industrial capitalism.
Sometimes people like to focus on 1776 as a watershed: a nexus that unites The American Declaration of Independence, Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations and James Watt’s steam engine. But the nation state grew in full only during the 1800s, beginning from the most industrialized countries, notably Great Britain.
The indust
rialization processes unfolded in what has roughly been described as “Kondratiev waves” (after the early Soviet economist Nikolai Kondratiev)—waves of new technologies that were introduced, expanded for a period of time and eventually came to form the basis of the economy. The details need not concern us here, beyond the fact that the nation state emerged in ebbs and flows during the first three of these waves of industrialization:
The industrial revolution—1771 and onwards.
The age of steam and railways—1829 and onwards.
The age of steel and heavy engineering—1875 (until the wave of oil, electricity, the automobile and mass production, which is said to begin in 1908).
The point is that the transition into an industrial society makes state building possible on a whole new scale. As people move from farming to factory work and wage labor, many more people gather in small urban areas and develop new and similar economic interests. Because there are now quite effective firearms and printed papers or pamphlets that can easily be distributed to large groups, a new family of threats emerge to the order of society: riots, strike and revolution.
The birth of the nation state stems from the taming and harnessing of the forces of the growing urban masses: of the active and deliberate effort to coordinate people’s everyday activities and lives at a massive scale. As industrial (and colonial) capitalism increasingly coordinates people’s time and attention across time and space through the emergent patterns we call the firm, the company, the corporation, or just “business”—so does a corresponding coordination occur at the level of the state’s monopoly of violence.
The increasing complexity and size of the market make it possible for states to garner the spoils of economic growth, in turn increasing how effectively their violence can be projected—internally, against the citizens, and externally, across the globe.
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