Power-grabs occur repeatedly throughout history. They are all motivated by
the hunger for status, particularly by the male, but transfers of power
express themselves at many different levels. They can be crudely obvious,
such as two boxers fighting for a world championship, or they can be
subtle, long-term and well-nigh invisible except to the historian who can
look backwards with the benefit of hindsight.
There was a time when power-grabs were only of one sort and took place in
regular fashion. This was when we were a purely scavenger-gatherer-hunter
species and lived in small groups. Every so often, maybe every 20 or 30
years at the most, the weakening leader of a group would be displaced by a
younger male. In due course, when the new leader was older and less
confident in his political grip, he would be nudged aside by another rising
upstart.
Today, because we live in much more complex times, several power-grabs can
be going on simultaneously. They take place over different time-scales and
apparently in different sectors so they're not equally visible. Indeed, for
most people, going about their own business in their daily lives, the more
significant power changes that are actually affecting them are not even
visible at all. Despite the apparently important power changes that are
mentioned in the media from time to time -- such as elections of
politicians or leadership of big businesses -- the real ones are almost
subterranean and take place over at least one whole generation.
The accession of Bob Diamond to be the new boss of Barclays Bank, reported
this morning, is not terribly important in the scheme of things. He may, or
may not, be good for Barclays. Indeed, it is conceivable that he might take
decisions in the coming months or years that might destroy it. On the other
hand -- as I'm sure he wants to accomplish -- he might make Barclays Bank
into the greatest and most profitable bank in the world.
But whatever may happen to Barclays in particular, it won't affect the role
of banking in the world as a whole. The fact is that banks -- investment
banks, retail banks, regional banks, community banks -- are hugely
important to everybody, even to the very poorest people. Furthermore, they
are now vying with governments as important determinants in economic
decision-making and direction.
Which leads me directly to the theme of my thoughts this morning as I
stumbled about making a pot of tea -- the two really important power
changes that are now going on. We cannot really put a date on the birth of
one of them because it's been going on for centuries. If I am forced to
give a date I would suggest sometime between 1561 and 1626, the lifetime of
Francis Bacon, the English philosopher, statesman, lawyer, jurist and
author who also happened to be the first person who realized the importance
of experimentation in science.
Since then, science has become increasingly important and is increasingly
informing all the big economic decisions of the present power-holders and
aspirants. In due course -- perhaps a century from now -- scientists may
come into their own nakedly. (Are we to welcome this or fear this? Who can
say? Scientists have the same genes as our present power-holders and can be
as wayward or as beneficent as anybody else.)
The formal power-holders today are nation-state governments, consisting of
politicians, usually closely backed up by a more meritocratic bureaucracy.
Indeed, a case could be well made that the latter are much the more
powerful of the two. Nation-states have also been a long time in the
making, notably from the Treaty of Westphalia (1648) when European kings,
princes and potentates finally succeeded in taking back power from the
Medieval Church (the latter being a reminder that power institutions often
take a long time to die).
Nation-states started rising to their present zemith of power during the
19th century when a powerful bow wave of the new middle-classes, impelled
by industrialization, challenged and then took over the political power of
the land-owning aristocracy and its minions. As byproducts of
industrialization, new terrifying weapons of war such as the light
horse-drawn artillery gun or the Maxim machine gun enable the first
nation-states in the field (as it were!) to colonize vast chunks of the
world and wage war on one another.
Nationalistic wars started in earnest about a century ago -- the Great War
of 1914-1918, for example -- but have largely petered out now, except
against weak countries, because even the greatest nation-states, such as
America, can't afford it. All the advanced governments are technically
bankrupt. They can only pretend to be "in" power because they still have
command over the money printing-press. But it is very doubtful indeed --
even with lashings of inflated money in the years to come -- whether their
tax-payers will ever be able to rescue them and restore them to their
former position.
The truth of the matter is that nation-states are not only unable to wage
full-scale war any longer, they are no longer in charge of their economies.
When they heaved out gold as the world currency slightly less than a
century ago and took over the printing of currency they also thought that
they were in charge of their economies. And so they were in a rather
negative ramshackle way, jerking about from one war to another or one
economic recession to another.
But now, with the effectiveness of weapons of war out of the way -- too
expensive and/or too dreadful to be used on a massive scale -- other
products of science and development are coming to the fore. Automation in
the factories and digitalization of currencies are shifting economic
decisions away from government and into big business and banks.
Increasingly, they decide what they want to do and where they want to do
it. Increasingly -- though they would not want to describe their activities
in this way -- they are playing ducks and drakes with governments.
Governments with field guns and customs posts are now giving way to huge
business and banking organizations which are rather more shaped like
world-wide spider webs than territorial blobs as they maximise their
efficiency in producing goods and services and, at the same time, also seek
the affection and support of consumers. Business and banks don't always
succeed, of course. They're liable to be fallible just like politicians and
bureaucrats but, unlike them, the less efficient of them go bankrupt --
really, legally and permanently so.
This didn't necessarily happen to all distressed businesses during the last
-- the present -- credit crunch. European and American governments rescued
some large multinationals and some international banks which happened to
employ lots of their electorates. They did this by printing money,
euphemistically called Quantitative Easing, and sliding it into business
balance sheets. They may even try to do so again if we have a double-dip in
the remainder of this year. But whether they do or they don't they're
really onto a loser because electorates are increasingly distrusting them
and investors are avoiding buying their bonds.
Meanwhile, even during the present recession, many large businesses and
banks are doing very well, thank you. Even some countries, such as India
and China, which are not yet full graduates of the advanced nation-state
university, are doing moderately well. Governments, as repositories of
justice, will always be needed, of course, but future historians will
probably regard the 2008/9 period as the critical threshold in the transfer
of political power from nation-state governments to bodies which are
entirely different in the way they organize themselves.
Typically, a large business has no more than about four levels of
management. Information flows up and control flows down much more readily
than in nation-states where, typically, information and control has to be
conveyed through at least 20 bureaucratic levels between politicians and
ordinary folk (and often between competitive bureaucratic silos within the
government). No wonder information becomes increasingly filtered or
misinterpreted on its way up. No wonder control has so many opportunities
to become impractical on its way downwards and even counter-productive when
it finally arrives.
In truth, multinational organizations despite their size are much nearer to
the simpler power structure of the hunter-gatherer tribe than
nation-states. In due course, scientists might be able to flatten the
organisational structure of multinationals even further. That is probably a
century away yet but, given the rapid growth of the evolutionary sciences
within science as a whole, we will have a chance sometime in the future of
actually shaping our organizations so that they are more in line with the
way our behavioural genes have evolved for at least 150,000 to 200,000
years and, in many respects for several million years before that.
Keith
Keith Hudson, Saltford, England
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