The Levelling
Page 9
In keeping with the pattern of a paradigm shift, new ideas rather than scorn and social media noise are what can distinguish the period ahead. The philosopher Isaiah Berlin referred to the search for new ideas as man’s most elevating experience.24 Though the concept of the paradigm shift gives a sense of how new ideas are forged, the manufacture of ideas and their dissemination also deserve attention, not least because, as recent history has shown, bad ideas can travel faster and farther than good ones. This discrepancy in the dissemination of ideas is, of course, important because for the levelling to be positive it must be based on good rather than bad ideas.
Therefore, in the context of a paradigm shift, we need to understand how good, constructive ideas can percolate to the surface of public debate. Dan Drezner, in his book The Ideas Industry, describes how the formation of ideas has moved beyond universities to think tanks, consultancies, and investment banks. The creation of new databases and data sources is part of this, as is the use of social media to amplify ideas. Many people feel that social media has damaged both the democratic and intellectual space by allowing noise and rancor to overcome good ideas and, equally, by boosting bad ideas and negative sentiment. What many feel about social media reminds me of the 1976 film Network, whose protagonist, a newscaster, is driven mad by the demands that network TV places on him and who, in an on-air rant, declares, “I’m as mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore.”
Another element in the development of ideas that deserves more attention is the rise of cross-disciplinary research that mixes insights into, say, biology and anthropology with insights in economics, for example. This mingling of disciplines is critical because, to reiterate a point made earlier in this book, the forces operating on our world—financial, scientific, social, economic, and diplomatic—are intertwined. A useful example of the multidisciplinary way we need to think about the world comes from the Santa Fe Institute, which is unique because of the eminence of its researchers but also in the way they bring together perspectives from very different fields of study to try to better understand complex, adaptive systems.25
The nub of The Levelling is that the world is entering a transition phase moving toward a state of being that will be different from what we have enjoyed in the past thirty years. The early phase—ranging from the financial crisis to the democratic recession—where we now find ourselves looks noisy, chaotic, and directionless. And the disruption is not simply a developed-world problem: look at the contests in Turkey and in African countries like Kenya and South Africa between dominant individuals and institutions such as the media, the judiciary, and constitutional law. Noise, chaos, and a search for direction are characteristics of the early phase of paradigm shifts. Our future could be a grisly repeat of 1913, the last time globalization came to an end.
One could conjure up a nasty, dystopian vision of a society that looks like a scene from a painting by Pieter Bruegel (I’m thinking of The Fight between Carnival and Lent or even The Triumph of Death) or of the kind of future set out in the television series The Handmaid’s Tale (based on Margaret Atwood’s book of the same name). Imagine societies cleft by inequality, where racism is again institutionalized, where, with echoes of the 1920s, sterilization and euthanasia are spoken of as policy options (the critical backlash from the scientific community against Nicholas Wade’s A Troublesome Inheritance, in which he links natural selection, race, and genetics, underscores the sensitivity to such proposals),26 where Chinese Americans are purged from jobs in Silicon Valley and in government, where fiscal paradises are replaced by ethical paradises,* where the trend rate of growth worldwide drops from 3 percent to 1 percent, and where humans serve technology rather than the other way around. I will stop there. But it is not hard to paint a picture in which some of the trends we are now experiencing in the world run out of control.
A less extreme, more realistic scenario is that the majority of people will come to firmly believe that the world around them is changing dramatically and that their needs are not well represented or understood by politicians. The logical extension of this is that new policies, new frameworks, and new ideas need to shape an outlook that is more constructive and better balanced. These new ideas cut across politics and democracies, economics, finance, and diplomacy, all of which are interconnected. I emphasize four problems in particular.
I will start with economics, and having mocked forecasters and avoided the flimsy science of forecasting, I will now boldly forecast what will happen to the international economic political order over the next five or so years, through the mid 2020s. The chief risk is of recessions in the United States and China. The Chinese economy is replete with fault lines (debt, low productivity, the effects of environmental damage on the slowdown of the economy). The US expansion, already the second longest since 1870, is running out of steam as inflation rises, central bank stimulus reverses, and both debt and the fiscal deficit rise to historically high levels. An economic crisis, or two, that severely tests policy makers is on the horizon. Worse still will be the realization that the average or trend level of growth for the next ten years, through the 2020s, will be lower than that of the past thirty years. Over the past thirty years, global economic growth has averaged 3.5 percent, but maturing emerging economies, aging populations worldwide, the need for debt levels to contract, and low productivity all mean that it could fall to closer to 2 percent. This may seem like a manageable downshift, but assumptions of a generous level of economic growth is hardwired into financial markets, policy bodies, government spending assumptions, and corporate strategies, so that a step change lower would provoke a painful and long-lasting correction.
From the point of view of the levelling, this means a number of things. The first is that politicians will be tested to an even greater degree to produce balanced growth. Following nearly two decades of economic growth being enabled by rising debt and the overlordly influence of central banks, there is an urgent need to rediscover the formula for organic growth. My contention is that the source of organic growth is to be found in the quality of the rule of law, institutions, and investment in humans (through education and technology). In addition, the idea of human development as a central pillar of economic growth needs to be given much greater credence.
The second problem is that before organic growth can flourish, the imbalances created in the world economy and financial system over the past twenty years need to be dealt with. There has been a scandalous degree of complacency over the facts that debt levels internationally are higher than ever before, that central banks, in their efforts to rescue the world economy from the global financial crisis, have simply encouraged more debt issuance by companies and governments, and that this has led to inefficient allocation of capital. Unless central banks can fully disengage from quantitative easing and unless world debt levels are pared down, it will be impossible for growth to flourish again because the burden of debt on government spending, company balance sheets, and households will prove restrictive.
The third problem relates to geopolitics and what has come to be known as the “world order”—the way power is distributed among the players on the global stage. The levelling will see an emerging multipolar world dominated by at least three large regions that do things (e.g., democracy, economics, and religion) increasingly distinctly. New rules of the road and new institutions will need to be crafted, and old ones will fade. The idea of the rise and fall of nations will gain prominence: post-Brexit Britain will have to reinvent itself, India will have to decide whether it wants to be a superpower, and Russia will have to generate economic power. New constellations of countries will spring up, and the way we look at the relationship between democracy and development will change as it becomes clear that in many countries, democracy was not a prerequisite for economic growth (notably China).
Fourth, and perhaps most important, the levelling makes a demand and asks a question. The demand is that economic policy must focus more on people: on curbing the side effects of new t
echnologies and lifestyle problems such as obesity and on recultivating the ethic of human development as a core economic policy. Most of the major economies—the United States, China, and the United Kingdom, for instance—do not do this. The question is to the public themselves and it is simply this: What do you want? Let me forestall readers from responding with answers like “a yacht,” “lots of money,” or “a nice holiday home,” by saying that my question is a challenge to the public at large to express in a coherent and practical way what they want from politicians and their political systems. I fundamentally believe that electing politicians with extreme views or extreme modes of behavior, together with inchoate parties on the extreme left and right, will not fix political systems, and neither will it shape them for the twenty-first century.
This will soon become clear in the United States, the United Kingdom, and further afield. At some stage, protest voting, the seductive attraction of strongmen and strongwomen, and the lure of nationalism will prove unsatisfying in terms of their policies and consequences. The previous chapter showed that there are many pressure points acting on societies, minds, bodies, and wallets. The logical question is, What do people expect to be done about this, especially those who vote for more extreme political outcomes? There could be many competing answers here. The one that seems plausible to me is that people want more accountability from their elected representatives. By this I mean that they want their elected representatives to better understand their fears and needs, to be answerable where possible, and to react to those fears and needs in a constructive way. For example, harassing, threatening, and deporting immigrants is not a solution to the issue of immigrant flows, an issue that needs to be resolved across a range of policy areas: diplomacy, social services, housing capacity, and education, to name just a few.
There are several reasons why more accountability (which I define as taking responsibility for issues and acting to resolve them in a way that adds to long-term socioeconomic stability) is desired by voters. To start with, the era of globalization has seen power ebb away from elected officials. Companies have grown bigger than countries, and they exploit differences in laws across nations. The global financial crisis saw policy makers and governments in many countries struggle for a long period of time in the face of financial market chaos and economic breakdown.
Central banks then moved into the economic policy space normally occupied by politicians. In Europe, power is increasingly seen to be concentrated in the hands of the European Commission and large countries such as Germany rather than in the hands of smaller, individual nation-states such as Finland or Greece. New technologies have risen up (social media being a prime example) with little corresponding cybersecurity, safeguards for consumers from cyberbullying, or guarantees of authenticity of content. Together they have opened up an entirely different world where concepts of trust, truth, and social interaction are being challenged. These are just a few examples to show that much of what happens in our world carries on in a space that is above the heads of most elected officials and the broader policy-making community.
This concern that policy makers are out of their depth might also explain the popularity of strongman-type leaders, or at least of politicians who project themselves as pragmatic, can-do types in countries as disparate as Turkey, the United States, the Philippines, Hungary, and Poland. Similarly, we witness the rise of politicians who demand that political power become increasingly concentrated in and associated with a single individual (i.e., China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, and maybe even France).
One of the key reasons for stressing the notion of accountability/responsibility as part of the levelling is that it speaks to the very large gap in power between the public and many of those in positions of power. This gap reflects an emerging narrative around politics in the developing and developed world that states that politics is less about left and right and more about insiders and outsiders. This gap is the reason why the example of the seventeenth-century battle between Levellers and Grandees is so relevant today. This tension is also captured in a number of recent books; David Goodhart’s The Road to Somewhere is an example. He splits British society into two value blocks: “Anywheres” and “Somewheres” (his thesis arguably also applies to the gaps between the communities in, say, New York or Boston or Los Angeles and middle America). The Anywheres, who make up about a quarter of the population, according to Goodhart, are involved in running the country, or they work in the knowledge economy. They are well educated and value mobility and autonomy, they can adjust to social change, and their view of the world is not rooted in any particular place (“Anywhere”).
In contrast, Somewheres are less well educated; are rooted in specific geographies (i.e., they still live near where they were brought up); value groups, tradition, families, and communities; and are more troubled by immigration and ethnic change. They are the social group most vulnerable to changes in labor markets, as they neither inhabit the upper echelons of the job market nor are under pressure from technology, process redesign, and immigration in the lower tiers of the job market.
A related, strange development, which might reflect the Somewhere/Anywhere division, is that the personal characteristics of politicians have become less traditional, less family-centric. In Europe, nearly half the leaders of the European Union’s twenty-seven states, plus Britain, have no children, and a rising number of politicians are gay. This suggests that the intensity (and perhaps cruelty) of the political game makes it increasingly difficult to enjoy both a family life and a political career. If this is the case, it is a pity, and the burdens on politicians (from the media and social media) should be shifted. However, from a sociopolitical point of view, this new type of politician is increasingly distant from those who vote for them, at a personal and a social level.
These trends add up to the need to reassess politics. Donald Trump has shown that he can beat politicians at their own game by upsetting the conventions on which politics has been based. My objective is not to obsess about President Trump and his modus operandi but to look for new ways of narrowing the gap between people and those who are given the privilege of governing them. The starting point in this challenge is for people, rather than their leaders, to decide what they want from politics. One of the best examples of how this can be done lies with the example of the Levellers.
* Distributed ledger technology “allows simultaneous access, validation and record updating… across a network spread across multiple entities or locations. [It is] more commonly known as the blockchain technology.” “Distributed Ledger Technology,” Investopedia, https://www.investopedia.com/terms/d/distributed-ledger-technology-dlt.asp.
* What I have in mind here is that some countries condone and accept practices in areas like genetic editing that are not commonly or legally accepted around the world.
FOUR
THE LEVELLERS
Agreements of the People
St. Mary’s
Let’s rejoin the first pages of this book where I introduced the site of the Putney Debates. If you follow my steps south on the way out of London, across the busy and congested Putney Bridge, there lies St. Mary’s Church in Putney, somewhat hidden and dominated by newer, neighboring buildings. It is likely that most of those who pass St. Mary’s do not realize its significance in the history of democracy.
Entering the church, it is hard to miss the nave inscription: “For really I thinke that the poorest hee that is in England hath a life to live as the greatest he.”1 It comes from Colonel Thomas Rainsborough, an officer and military hero in Oliver Cromwell’s New Model Army and a prominent member of the Levellers. It gives a clue as to the kind of sentiment that once flowed from the Levellers.
Those sentiments were born out of England’s First Civil War (1642–1646) between the Royalist supporters of Charles I (Cavaliers) and Cromwell’s Parliamentarians (Roundheads). The leaders (Grandees) of Cromwell’s New Model Army captured Charles and attempted to negotiate a settlement with him. However, an
d unusually for the time, this faltered amid opposition from the rank and file of the army, who had more ambitious aims than the mere fashioning of an understanding with Charles. This substantial faction in the army (the Levellers) wanted what we would recognize today as democracy and equality. Ostensibly in order to hear their views and to help inform a new constitution, Cromwell held the Putney Debates, principally on the location of St. Mary’s Church on the Thames.
This was an unprecedented undertaking in that it gave rank-and-file soldiers a voice in the aims of the army and the future English Constitution. Viewed against the long run of history, this kind of debate was radical and to many represented the beginning of a world turned upside down. Such a departure was in many ways testament to the power of the Levellers. They had become the predominant group among a number of movements that grew up in mid-seventeenth-century Britain in response to growing questioning of the power of the king, grievances over the ownership of land, and a budding sense of equality.
In the chaotic post–Civil War period (1642–1649), people were exercised by a sense that the poverty and deprivation of the ordinary man were unjust, that they were badly represented by corrupt politicians who ruled over them, and that the people merited at the very least some voice in the affairs of the country.
In common with many new movements through the ages, the Levellers were initially dismissed as a lunatic fringe. The term “Leveller” was a term of abuse, casting the Levellers as “hedge cutters,” or yokels, and ignorant rabble, betraying the negative light in which they were seen. But the Levellers themselves saw the term as meaning a levelling of the law and political power to produce equality across people.