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The End of the Noughties I believe the Noughties is the decade of mass media entertainment, of mindless celebrities, vacuous politicians, titillating tabloids and worthless ideological broadsheets. Bush, the Born Again Christian President, and Obama, the policy light Afro-American President, epitomise the decade just as much as Simon Cowell and Rupert Murdock. The overpaid footballers, TV presenters and bankers are another component of this bankrupt culture with its focus on personal gain rather than intellectual progress. Over at the FT, some of my favourite end of decade articles are: The decade the world tilted east, How the noughties were a hinge of history, The end of Britain’s long weekend, Ageing populations will pile on the pain, Global tides that shaped the Noughties. These articles have mostly picked up on the theme of economic decline in the West and the ascendancy of China. From these articles we have: First, we are seeing at least the beginning of the end not just of an illusory “unipolar moment” for the US, but of western supremacy, in general, and of Anglo-American power, in particular. I am trying to remember now where it was, and when it was, that it hit me. Was it during my first walk along the Bund in Shanghai in 2005? Was it amid the smog and dust of Chonqing, listening to a local Communist party official describe a vast mound of rubble as the future financial centre of south-west China? That was last year, and somehow it impressed me more than all the synchronised razzamatazz of the Olympic opening ceremony in Beijing. Or was it at Carnegie Hall only last month, as I sat mesmerised by the music of Angel Lam, the dazzlingly gifted young Chinese composer who personifies the Orientalisation of classical music? I think maybe it was only then that I really got the point about this decade, just as it was drawing to a close: that we are living through the end of 500 years of western ascendancy. Comparing the optimism of December 1999 with December 2009:
Wind the clock back 10 years to the
start of the new millennium and things looked very different. The public
finances of the Group of Seven leading economies posted a small surplus
in 2000 for the first time in years, surpluses that were as large as 3.9
per cent of national income for the UK and 1.9 per cent for the US and
Canada. The optimism was catching. It reflected the economic success [the dot com boom] and favourable demographics of the 1990s... Hope for the noughties was overwhelming. And wrong.
Ten years on, the projected annual
government deficit among advanced economies for 2010 is 8.3 per cent of
national income, a level that guarantees public debt continues to rise.
It all sounds terribly depressing, but is that because we are concentrating on the Western perspective and missing the bigger picture of improving conditions in China? One of the articles is very pessimistic:
... the retreat of the glaciers (and polar ice
caps) tells us the primary datum of the decade has been physical
degradation of the planet. Give me a sceptic and I will take him to
Shanghai or São Paulo on a day of ripe smog and see how sceptical he
remains while coughing his guts into a mask and peering at brown
sunlight as if through a dome of begrimed glass. Lake Baikal is a saline
puddle and the Sahara is heading for Timbuktu. If the earth is not yet
in its terminal death rattle, it sure ain’t looking good. Population
pressure on shrinking and degraded resources in the poorest parts of the
world is unrelenting and no mega-city – Lagos, Caracas, Rio, Mumbai – is
without its mountain range of trash on which humans can be seen like
skeletal goats picking over the black plastic for something to eat.
Along with drought and famine, pandemics have returned: in which, like
some as yet unwritten scripture, the animal kingdom – avian, porcine,
bovine – is a bellwether of human perishability. What gave the west the edge over the east over the past 500 years? [and how, if at all, has this changed] His answer did not impress me, but at least he asked the right question, which is of course half the battle. Here is my answer: Carl Jung speculated that "Unlike the Western mind, the Chinese mind does not aim at grasping details for their own sake, but at a view which sees the detail as a part of the whole." More blinkered Western thinking may have contributed to the empiricist revolution which contributed to the Age of Enlightenment. However, the reflection of this underlying psychic differentiation on personality, as Western individualism vs Eastern cohesion, may be a more significant factor. Out of individualism we have the moral principle of sacrosanct individual freedoms, which demands liberal democracy. Also we have the creativity which dared to challenge religious and political orthodoxy. The Chinese tended to be more tolerant of greater political and social control and consequently suffered longer under tyrannical regimes which did little to promote human progress. When the people were finally liberated, the naivety of the economic models and the terrible fervour of an idealistic and cohesive populace accustomed to violent repression ensured complete disaster. Western individualism obviously lacks a degree of idealism measured by the willingness of individuals to put aside personal goals in favour of community goals. Yet Englishmen in the First World War charged to certain death at the blow of a whistle - but something has changed - today such disciplined self sacrifice is completely inconceivable. Individualism corrupted can turn a useful creative force into a radically negative reappraisal of prevailing assumptions about culture, identity and purpose. An increasingly important component of Western decline is the precipitous intellectual decline of the noughties - the essence that I argued at the beginning of this article is so intrinsic to the decade - which, by democracy, now drives policy making. Capitalists, Socialists, Nazis and even the Agrarian Communists of Cambodia all have something in common: they are ideologists not scientists. Democracy is a tool for choosing the prevailing ideology, rather than confining decision making to specialists who can calculate optimal policy, therefore it reflects simple human value judgments, so it is deeply unscientific. Yet our populations have grown so large, our societies so complex, the environmental challenge so extreme, that bold scientific leadership, not democracy, is now vital. What few Westerners have grasped is that scientific government is precisely the essence of Chinese / Singaporean system. It is the government of intellectual technocrats and engineers who can uproot one and a half million of their tolerant people to build the worlds largest hydroelectric project which produces as much electricity as 16 nuclear plants. The failed ideology of China's past is gone, all that remains in its place is white hot scientific pragmatism, defying all attempts to be boxed into one of our existing moral systems such as Capitalism or Socialism. In the 1930s the public fretted about the threat authoritarianism posed to democracy, eg the idea that dictatorship in Germany gave that country's wartime economy frightening advantages by creating great efficiencies throughout the economy, in comparison to the cacophony of forces that shape the production possibilities of democracy. However, Hitler's madness and Stalin's attachment to efficiency sapping equality appeared to end the debate. In the 1980s the rise of One Party Technocratic Japan again rocked the boat, but the Japanese boom broke, and their democratic political system now appears even more incompetent that America's. Now China has reopened the debate at a time when leadership in the West has reached a nadir, and challenges a zenith. Yet it goes further, idealism is intrinsic to the scientific system. For example, the drive to promote Classical music in China is driven by the calculation that aesthetics are an important component of human progress. By experimentation, by measurement, the system shapes society rather than, as in democracy, giving it what it thinks it wants. The Chinese people are already enormously hard working, cohesive and idealistic; now their political system amplifies these characteristics. Recall the earlier lines: I sat mesmerised by the music of Angel Lam, the dazzlingly gifted young Chinese composer who personifies the Orientalisation of classical music. I think maybe it was only then that I really got the point about this decade. It is not just weight of numbers, something absolutely extraordinary is occurring in China, just as the West sinks into the abyss of vacuous materialism, intellectual idealism is taking hold of the East. The key to China's future is the sustainability of this idealism, perhaps the people will succumb to the materialistic excess which haunts the nouveau riche, eg the rampant consumerism of 1988 Japan in which the rich proudly mixed 7 Up with Château Pétrus. In conclusion, I am not pessimistic, quite the reverse. Human evolution continues and the Chinese revolution looks to me like the most exciting thing since Ancient Rome. This new zeitgeist is exemplified by the Three Georges Dam, the Sky Scrapers of Shanghi, the One Child Policy and the gifted young Chinese composer who personifies the Orientalisation of classical music. My father, Lord Justice Hooper, responded with: I enjoyed your article and agreed with some of the sentiments [intellectual decline of the noughties]. I would stress the completely irresponsible world of the blog - particularly as seen in the USA, where anything can be said however removed from reality and truth. Sarah Palin sums it up for me with her attack on Obama's health reform "death committees". That said I remain very sceptical of your idolization of China and Singapore. I do not believe that China will be an exception to the rule that "all power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely". Remember that I was born in an era where many "right" thinking people saw German Nazis as the cure for all evils including late running trains. I then grew up in an era when many on the left idolized Russia and Eastern Europe as examples of how society should be conducted to achieve happiness for the majority. Should we praise a society in which a person, Liu Xiaobo, who published a pro democracy document goes to jail for 11 years? And what of the bereft parents who, when demanding an enquiry into why their children were killed by collapsing schools when other buildings did not collapse, are harassed and persecuted? Are some human beings expendable to achieve "so called betterment or happiness" for other human beings? Who is to be the decision maker? In authoritarian societies it is those who have grabbed the reins of power, and maintain it by unsavoury means, who claim the exclusive right to decide. You may be right but history tends to show that you are likely to be wrong. I am going to have to write something about China and Human Rights one day. But putting aside the seriousness of their crimes for a moment, try to consider the issue with varying degrees of historical perspective. Lets consider two regimes, Stalin and the Roman Empire. Looking back at Stalin most people today see primarily horror. In Russia, however, opinion is more nuanced. While Stalin is generally regarded as evil, there is an appreciation of the fact that he rapidly transformed a poor rural society into a superpower (which, essentially single handily, defeated Hitler). In other words Stalin deserves a degree of credit for sacrificing human life on the alter of progress. Looking back at Ancient Rome I am sure many lives were sacrificed on the alter of progress, but today all we remember is the remarkable progress both in living standards and scientific accomplishment. In other words as our perspective turns from the sentimental here and now to the idealistic progression of human history, so does our conception of right and wrong, we move from a Christian morality to more Darwinian thinking. Nevertheless, I am not suggesting embracing slavery and genocide. I am just trying to explain that we make a profound mistake if we focus too minutely on individual human rights without taking into account the greater good. My father complains about the freedom to campaign political or judicial points in China today (a petition for democracy and a campaign for justice against allegedly bad builders), and then he asks Are some human beings expendable? He is probably thinking more about Hitler and Stalin than he is modern China, but I do need to give this topic greater attention. Very quickly, I believe governmental ethics divides into irreconcilable goals (individual liberty vs group sacrifice, pleasure vs painful growth) which render a precise constitution impossible (I reject deontology). Nevertheless, out of this I think it is possible to extract the principle that the boundaries of governmental power need to be broadly compatible with the level of idealism prevailing in society. The One Child Policy is hugely popular in China, but the personal sacrifices entailed are probably too much for modern Americans, ruling out its implementation in that country at this time. Although my model of authoritarian government draws only on as much power as the people offer, its greatness is in the idealism which it can bestow (compare, for example, the brave Spartans to the self interested Athenians). My father's most deadly argument is the question of the fitness of the Chinese Government to make these controversial judgements. The resolution of that is the concept of "enlightened authoritarianism", the maximization of measurable performance metrics, not the fallible human process of deducing policy decisions from ideological principles. My support for authoritarianism is conditional on that criteria holding, any 'more human' system is at risk of inefficiency and corruption. Ultimately his analysis fails when it concludes: You may be right but history tends to show that you are likely to be wrong. Any student of history who has not confined himself to the 20th Century knows modern liberal democracy is only in its infancy and democracy has failed both on moral and practical grounds in the past. It has been rejected by almost every major philosopher. Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, Machiavelli and Hobbes where all clearly opposed. Lock, Rousseau, Voltaire and Kant decried the despotic monarchs who clearly failed to govern either in the interest, or with the consent, of their subjects; yet they stopped short of advocating democracy. Rousseau, for example, championed the austere aristocracy of Sparta compared to the liberal democracy of Athens. Marx and Nietzsche were clearly opposed. Even Foucault, a 20th Century philosopher, objected to liberal democracy. Rawls, who wrote his politically correct Theory of Justice in the 1970s, is arguably the first headline name to support democracy.
Edward Gibbon, in “The History of
the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire” perhaps best describes how
unequivocally history supports the authoritarian cause. Describing the
height of the Roman Empire he wrote: "If a man were called to fix the
period in the history of the world during which the condition of the
human race was most happy and prosperous, he would, without hesitation,
name that which elapsed from the death of Domitian to the accession of
Commodus. The vast extent of the Roman Empire was governed by absolute
power, under the guidance of virtue and wisdom". |