Hi Gail,
As you gave permission, I'm going to reply to your message (below) on open
list, because this concerns something I've touched upon several times on FW
in the last few years.
One evening in 1962, my wife and I took our radio to bed and buried
ourselves under a tent of blankets so that the voice of the newsreader
wouldn't waken our third child who was then sleeping in a cot in our
bedroom. Like millions of other people all round the world, we were petrified.
Krushchev was sending ships to Cuba with nuclear missiles on deck, ready to
be installed in sites already prepared for them on the island. Kennedy had
issued an ultimatium to Krushchev to turn his ships back -- or else there
would be nuclear war. The ships had steamed down the Atlantic in the
previous days and, as they were approaching Cuba, Krushchev was still
adamant. If I remember rightly, the news came over the radio just before
midnight our time. Krushchev finally gave way and his ships turned around.
My wife and I then went to sleep, reasonably confident that we and our
family would wake up in the morning.
Of course, Kennedy and Krushchev didn't have a personal quarrel, and it
would be too simplistic to say that the crisis had only been about the male
lust for power. (After all, it was Lady Thatcher who'd declared war on
Argentia -- against the advice of her male Foreign Secretary!) The K-K
confrontation involved ideologies, economics, institutions, historical
background and a great deal else. But stripped down to bare essentials,
almost all wars, almost all politics, right down to all wife-bashing in
even the nicest middle-class homes, are about the terrifyingly
inappropriate male use of power.
It wasn't inappropriate once. For millions of years, our primate
predecessors and early species of man needed this propensity so that the
small social groups in which we then lived could respond instantly when
facing a sabre-tooth tiger or other emergencies. There had to be instant
rank order, and this could only be the product of years of mutual
assessment and testing brought about by boys at play, youthful fights, and
then aggressive coups d'etats and new rank-orderings by new cadres of young
adult males when they felt that they were more able than their ageing
leaders. If the new leader turned out to be too oppressive in the normal
daily lives of the group, as must have happened many times, then the social
group was small enough, and the leader was accessible enough, for him to be
pulled down easily by coalitions of other males.
This strong instinct within the human male is something that is hardly ever
discussed (except by political journalists and historians) but is all
around us constantly. We can't escape from it. It permeates all
institutions whether business corporations, civil services, political
parties and governments -- even universities! And the larger the
institution, and the more potential power that's to be obtained there, the
more potentially dangerous our instinct is.
Bitter quarrels take place constantly. They're less visible in business and
bureaucracies, but are all too readily visible in politics because, at the
end of the day, a politician might have to call upon the support of
sufficient of the electorate if the quarrel become irreconcilable.
We can't get rid of the instinct itself unless, in future times, we go in
for radical surgery on our DNA. So what to do? To my mind, the solution is
two-fold. We need to reduce the size of our institutions as far as
possible; and we need to reduce the number of functions of institutions as
far as possible.
I think we can be reasonably optimistic (over the longer term) about both.
As far as I'm aware, only one economist, Ernst Schumacher, has written on
the first point. His book, "Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People
Mattered", published almost 30 years ago, is still in print and is still
quietly influencing many people.
As to the need to reduce the number of functions, I'm sure that many
economists have written on this matter though I can't think of any leading
exponent at present. However, this viewpoint is certainly being taken on
board by business corporations. The fashion for sheer size and diversity of
functions that was so prevalent in the 60s and 70s has long since died. And
the recent example of Enron is one of the exceptions that further proves
the rule. Once it started to diversify away from its original purpose of
long term electricity prices (which was probably good for customers,
domestic and commercial) and into a multitude of other things where there
were potentialities for futures dealings (even weather forecasting, so help
us!) then its failures mounted and had to be hidden before they could be
exposed.
Of course, it's much more important for businesses to get their
organisations right or else they die. This happens constantly, especially
to large businesses. In the last 20 years 5 companies have dropped out of
"Fortune"s list of the top 10 companies, and 20 out of the top 50. This is
a pretty high mortality rate and this is why businesspeople pay more
attention to keeping their organisations trim and efficient than governments.
However, the benefits of reducing the number of functions is finally
getting through to politicians and government officials. The obvious
success of most (though not all) privatisations in England since Thatcher's
day is still spreading around the world. The Bank of England has become
(slightly) more independent from the Treasury. Also, the mammoth civil
service departments in England are beginning to hive themselves off into
much smaller, more specialised units, which is a start anyway. (When one
recent ex-Minister for Trade was in power he was asked by a friend what one
of his sub-departments of 7,000 civil servants was actually responsible
for. He wrote in his memoirs that he was never able to get a satisfactory
answer from his senior officials.)
This topic started with political events in Ontario and British Columbia
and it would be quite out of order for me to suggest solutions there. All I
would say is that the lessons of the wider world should be noted. In
particular, provincial governments should seriously ask themselves whether
some of their functions couldn't be done more efficiently by other types of
non-governmental organisations.
Many people don't realise how recent it's been since many functions have
been considered to be 'natural' to governments rather than other sorts of
bodies, voluntary or commercial. It all really started with the ideas of
John Stuart Mill in the midst 19th century who piled suggestion on
suggestion in his "Principles" as to what governments should be doing. His
book was immensely influential and his idea were quickly followed by a
posse of Oxbridge graduates who established the modern civil service and
have remorsessly expanded it ever since by adding one function after another.
But until governments slim down to their fundamental functions, which are
really rather few, then politics will always be attractive to those
politicians whom Auberon Waugh (who knew a lot of them personally during
his lifetime) characterised as "emotionally deficient" -- those who need a
lot of power for psychological reasons. Although other politicians
genuinely want to serve the public, the nasty ad hominem arguments between
many politicians are bringing government into disrepute. For example, in
England, the furious rows that are known to take place between our two most
powerful politicians, the Prime Minister and the Chancellor, have become
something akin to a TV soap opera. Increasingly, the public have little
respect for any politicians, the good as well as the bad. This is seriously
bad news for any civilised society.
Harold Wilson, our Prime Minister in the 60s, said he wanted to drag the
country "screaming and kicking" into the 20th century. That was probably
the last time that the electorate actually believed that a Prime Minister
could actually achieve what he promised. No longer. The world is becoming
far too complex for politicians to be able to justify their competence in
all the expertise they lay claim to in their manifestos, particularly their
economic functions.
Politicians in England, realising that only about a quarter of young adults
between 18 and 30 years of age are voting, are becoming much more humble
than they used to be. Membership of all politicial parties is declining
rapidly -- now accounting for fewer than 1 in 60 people for all Parties.
Politicians have conspired with the TV broadcasters to put on
excruciatingly boring TV programmes on other channels when election
broadcasts are on -- but still most people click away from them. The
average age of the Labour Party is just less than 60 and that of the Tory
Party nearer 70.
The good news, Gail, is that I think the present sort of farmyard politics
is going to have to change radically at some stage in the next few years.
The bad news is that it will probably take a crisis for this to happen. But
perhaps the Enron affair will turn out to be the crisis we need! Perhaps
public insistence on outlawing the financing of political campaign funds by
corporations will change the whole set-up.
Keith
At 09:38 06/02/02 -0500, you wrote:
<<<<
Ed, Mike, Keith,
Having already a sufficient number of lines in the water on FW I don't want
to add another or would be sending you this question on-list. (If, in
response, you have a comment you'd like to put on-list, please don't
hesitate. It's not a private question.)
Ed wrote: "what his government is doing is driven by a punitive and
destructive ideology" (re Gordon Campbell in B.C.) and I had recently had
occasion to note on FW the "anger" with which the Harris government in
Ontario had come into office and behaved.
The issue of "anger" in politics is coming to seem to me the source of more
problems than ideology per se. Our political processes seem to legitimate
and perhaps even foster anger -- the release of distaste, dislike and
disrespect rather than the surge of empathy, compassion or thoughtfulness.
The larger ties-that-bind seem to get lost. I find it increasingly
frightening, likely to invite the growth of serious civil discontent and
especially unfortunate in an age when so many issues concern the "commons."
Does it point, do you think, to a need to strengthening the integrative
processes and temper the partisan or are such antipathetic emotions
healthy, maybe even essential outlets, in a body politic? Democracies use
the adversarial system deliberately and to good effect (e.g., parliaments
and courts, the "balancing of powers" in the US, etc.) but by taking for
granted that it is legitimate for leaders to govern "punitively and
destructively" it sometimes seems to me we risk corroding the foundations
of democratic politics that lie in fellow-feeling. Such leaders lose their
capacity to represent "all the people" thus threatening the legitimacy of
government itself. B.C. seems to me to verge on this from time to time.
Were it a country and not "merely" a province, safe within the arms of a
larger federation, I suspect it might be in difficulty in a system of
government that requires the consent of the governed to make it work.
Perhaps all this is so self-evident as not to be worth mentioning but
sometimes the necessary foundations of a situation become weakened through
being taken so for granted they are not articulated?
Your wisdom on this, gentlemen?
Regards,
Gail
Gail Stewart
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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�Writers used to write because they had something to say; now they write in
order to discover if they have something to say.� John D. Barrow
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Keith Hudson, Bath, England; e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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