Drifting: A Postscript to “Democratic Radicalism vs Liberal Radicalism”
A Note on Buterin et al’s “Liberal Radicalism”
This is a postscript to the article “Democratic Radicalism vs Liberal Radicalism” written by the AEIOU Executive Director Dr J Ellis Cameron-Perry.
“Our Drifting Civilization,” L P Jacks (1916)
LP Jacks was a British philosopher, and for part of his life editor of The Hibbert Journal, a respected forum which self-described as A Quarterly Review of Religion, Theology and Philosophy [1]. In a 1916 contribution to The Atlantic Monthly (“Our Drifting Civilization”), Jacks expresses his concern that humankind is showing remarkable skill at turning knowledge into killing-technologies — chlorine gas and airplanes are two examples he cites as evidence of “the outstanding anomaly of our civilization:”
For knowledge, as we all know, is the most deadly of weapons as well as the most useful of tools. What one nation gains for humanity by using knowledge as a tool another nation can always undo by using it as a weapon.
The subject of weaponizing knowledge via derivative technologies, and repurposing benign crafts for warcraft, appears in the second half of the article. As the title suggests, the overarching topic is whether humankind is steaming forward through time towards a destination, and on-course, or is drifting.
[T]he power of control which modern states possess over the course they are taking is inadequate to the immense forces which need direction, and to the magnitudes of the issues involved. As states become more and more unmanageable, history becomes more and more of a drift — wither we know not.
Proof of this is the war, Jacks says [2], into which the world had drifted — surely drifted, for no sane person would plot a course towards death, suffering, and waste. But whence the drift? Jacks discovers it in the “unmanagableness of the modern state.” I quote Jacks at length:
We must think, not only of the enormous mass of the state, as measured by the number of its people and the variety of its interests, but also of the equally enormous momentum with which it moves forward on its path. … It may be true, as St James says, that the rudder of a great ship is always a very little thing. But there is a great difference between the rudder of a dreadnought and the rudder of a coracle. I admit that moral forces do not work by the same quantitative scale; at the same time there is no denying that a moral force which could deflect a modern state, say from the path of industrial civilization, and set it going in the path of artistic civilization, would have to be of a very unusual kind. To stop or even turn these tendencies aside is extremely difficult, not merely because the masses engaged are so stupendous, but also because of the incalculable force they have gathered during the long period they have been in motion.
For Jacks, this situation invites anew considerations of “the ancient question of democracy versus oligarchy.”
Since the community is now self-governing, the masses to be guided and the guiding masses are roughly equal; and however big the community may grow, the controlling forces will grow in an equal proportion. Democratic states can never be too big for their rulers, for the rulers and the ruled are now one.
In theory, at any rate. “But this simple formula, which underlies so much of the political reasoning of our time, is not supported by the facts.”
[O]nly a very small part of the political forces of democracy is available for the guidance of the total state, for what I will call “mass policy.” By far the greater part of those forces, often amounting to nearly the whole, is expended in sectional controversy within the state itself, in the conflict of rival interests and in the warfare of innumerable groups. It is the way of all democracies to become preoccupied with the adjustment of their internal balances, the result being that of the total political force available very little is left over for the work of imperial guidance — far less, in fact, than is often found in oligarchic states. Adequate force for the guidance of the total mass may be there, but it is used up on other things. Much of it indeed is not strictly used at all, simply being nullified by mutual oppositions, and so may be struck out of the account so far as mass-policy is concerned.
This cancelling-out of opposed energies explains why the helmsman is often unable to keep course:
[I]t is precisely when democratic communities are thus brought to an apparent standstill through the action of inner oppositions that they fall into the sweep of invisible world-currents, and drift into situations where they fall into the sweep of world currents, and drift into situations where they never wished or expected to find themselves.
The first World War — with its U-boats, machine guns, chlorine gas, and Gen-1 fighter-planes — was where civilization had drifted in 1916. It is easy to understand why Jacks is concerned with tiny rudders, strong currents, and the inability of democratic processes to keep us away from shoal waters and reefs. The previous year saw the beginning of the Gallipoli campaign, the commencement of the Armenian genocide, and the first major deployment of gas in warfare.
But Jacks’ worries don’t validate his math. It’s tempting to concede that once factions have canceled each other out, the state is left only with the residual remainder for work aimed at securing the public interest. According to Jacks’ algebra, we always end up with oligarchy: once the mass of the majority has been reduced by subtracting from it a quantity equal to the mass of the opposing minority, the tiller ends up in the hands of the remainder of the majority — which is a minority。 Democracy, therefore, always results in minority rule. And if that’s the case, wouldn’t we be better off with a wiser, stronger oligarchy in the first place?
It’s a good question, and as Jacks correctly acknowledges it is an ancient one. “The whole matter, therefore, is one which deserves serious consideration by those who advocate democratic control of mass-policy,” Jacks says.
To secure effective guidance of the whole, we must first suppose that the democracy takes a real and intelligent interest in the question of its total movement, as well as that of its internal balance, — a condition which is hardly characteristic of the immense democratic states of modern times; and, furthermore, we must suppose that the democracy, being so deeply interested, is of one heart and will in the matter.
But we know better — as did Jacks. It’s rare a people is ever of one heart and will about anything, and I have yet to be convinced that the majority of people take a real and intelligent interest in the “total movement” of the ship of state.
The curious exception to this is authoritarian regimes, wherein the distinction between passenger and crew is sharper.
This is a postscript to the article “Democratic Radicalism vs Liberal Radicalism” written by the AEIOU Executive Director Dr J Ellis Cameron-Perry.
Footnotes
[1] Published between 1902 and 1968, the journal spanned a period that saw the collapse of imperialism, two world wars, the Holocaust, and the transition from radio to television and the latter’s triumph as the chief conduit of information and entertainment to the peoples of the Western world. It’s demise in 1968 is fitting. Jacks departed this world in 1955.
[2] Jacks cites the literature of his age (so voluminous it “threatens to choke the libraries”), and describes it as “the literature of ‘Where are we’.”
In all this literature we encounter civilization as a drifter at the mercy of the currents. Whether some conscious power other than the will of man regulates the course of the drift, is a question I do not discuss here. Enough that it does not appear to be the conscious will of man.
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