Governance and Government
The UK is now ungoverned, if not unhinged. It has a government, but one that has no legitimacy or executive capability. There is almost nothing that you can imagine that the current government could actually do, even if they wanted to. Even the notion of the government having will rings false — many conflicting wills perhaps.
In last week’s blog post we featured Smith’s first law: FIFA needs football more than football will ever need FIFA. Our colleague John Smith coined that first law (there are three) back in the days when Sepp Blatter was at FIFA. Arguably the corruption at FIFA then rendered it incapable of working in the interests of the game.[1]
What Smith’s first law raises as a serious question is whether we need a government. It is very clear both here and in the US that some governments are worse than no government at all. Some people have a knee-jerk assumption that someone must be in charge or it would be chaos — anarchy! But if you follow David Wengrow, much of the archaeological evidence points to civilisation being rather impromptu and pragmatic. Peoples across large geographical areas found ways to get on with each other. Often organisation was seasonal, with armies at one time of the year and other things to do in other seasons. We struggle to see history this way because we have lost our imaginations and our capacity to imagine solutions other than nation states with national governments, other than fixed roles and relationships.
This is a breakthrough thought: the government needs its electorate far more than the electorate need the government. That need for a trace of legitimacy for draconian, authoritarian actions can still be seen in the Chinese government’s nervousness. Young Chinese people have given up believing in their own government, in the US, and in the west. People in the UK are learning to be ever so wary of people claiming to speak in their name and represent their will. Protests are larger and more cohesive than political parties.[2]
Reification
Clearly government is a reification of governance. Like all reification, something major is lost and major risks are introduced. After all, we can have a government without any governing taking place. Governance, as an active function, can go AWOL at any time. The thing, government, is not the function, governance. Sometimes they coincide, that is all.
Let’s go systemic and say that there is no evidence for, and lots of evidence against, the notion that government must be centralised in order to get decisions made. The arguments for centralised things are broken: for first-past-the-post as an election system, for a centralised legal system, for centralised policy making, for national and international standards of all sorts.
From a systemic perspective, as we keep rehearsing, an ecosystemic structure of a myriad interlocking guilds and functions is more stable over time and much better at recycling key resources and stabilising the environment.[3] As with David Wengrow’s work, we struggle to see just how beautifully efficient and effective and liberating ecosystems are, because our learnt cultural prejudices get in the way. We say it is the government’s job to govern. Duh! We appoint managers to make things happen. Duh! We set up laws that distort the only ways things can work properly. Wilful blindness.[4]
From the perspective of a reified government, centralisation is everything. It is the centralisation assumption that keeps them in business. So long as everyone assumes that football needs FIFA, they can continue to spin their illusion of being in charge. They make the rules and according to them, we have to follow them. [5] The current crisis ensues when it becomes clear that the people making the rules are not making them for any reason that resembles governance or acting in the interest of the people who elected them. And of course the problem with any centralised structure is that it cannot adapt, for exactly the same reasons. Centralisation fosters competition for power, and might becomes right.
Let’s rehearse the current specifics. Particular elite and corporate interests in the US would like to annexe the UK government revenues that flow into the NHS. A government-guaranteed revenue stream and the prospect of being bailed out if anything goes wrong, these are attractive on a global scale in times of extreme economic uncertainty, during the everything bubble. All those people have to do is to destabilise the NHS so that it can be plausibly rescued and destabilise the UK government so that a “trade deal” with the US looks like salvation. What is never going to happen is that the health system in the US is going to be properly compared to the health system in the UK to see which system the UK might want to follow.
That is what government without governance looks like. The important thing to recognise is that if a government is not providing governance then the only governance is coming from elsewhere and probably the whole system is unstable. It is not unstable because of the bad things the government does but because the system is ungoverned.[6]
The freedom of the ungoverned
As a concrete example of a hiatus of government, consider the end of East Germany as a state. For four days there was no-one in charge, no-one to say do this and don’t do that.[7] A colleague of Aidan’s late father’s used the hiatus to go into the state archives. What he was able to show in the course of those four short days was that fully half of all the pastors of East Germany had been Stasi informers.
You can imagine the number of enemies the chap made in no time at all. But look at this differently. The truth of the church’s involvement with a fairly evil government was never going to be formally available. No official governance or government channels would ever carry that information. But the hiatus or lacuna made it possible to know without any shadow of doubt. Think of the number of people who needed to know what had happened to their relatives, and who had turned them in. Think of that in terms of the governance of the real system.
“There is a crack, a crack in everything: that’s how the light gets in.” — Leonard Cohen
Aidan’s father’s colleague made a move that could be called anarchic. We need a measure of anarchy to allow a system to breathe. I don’t see people in the UK today moving to make use of their own hiatus. Maybe they are doing so. We still have some of the repression of government in play: that hasn’t gone away.
The parts of a system
Some systems people understand that the system is at a different level to the parts. It has different aims and purposes, different values, different capabilities. The system rests on the parts but it is not independent of any of the parts. The governance of the system is just one of the parts of the system, albeit a part that must pay attention to the system as well as to the other parts.
We can tell by looking at human interaction with ecosystems that this is not understood. We talk about eradicating pests: plant, animal, insect, fungal, bacterial. All these things are parts of a system that works, is alive. If they become prevalent and destructive that is almost always because we have already damaged the system in some way. The fascist impulse in politics and social systems is precisely this: to remove the problem parts, to repress behaviours, to control communication, to say that black is white. I just watched AOC trying to get the FBI to acknowledge that if muslim aggressors are seen as terrorists then white supremacist aggressors should too. [8] The point clearly did not compute.
Something that is part of a system, for instance a reified government, cannot control the system it is part of. Basic systems theory. What it can do is get the system back into balance with itself and its environment. If there are no wolves or lynx in Scotland then there is nothing to prey on the deer. Deer numbers increase to the point where they damage the regeneration of forests for instance. This is not a problem with deer, it is a problem with humans having wiped out key predators. Culling deer becomes necessary to compensate for a previous mistake, otherwise the system gets further out of balance.[9]
Humans are part of the Highlands ecosystem and some humans try to take a governance (active function) role in controlling the numbers of deer. They can only do that by sensitively adjusting the numbers of deer and seeing if the ecosystem restores itself better. They cannot manage the system in the sense of trying to direct it. The problem of the number of humans and the number of sheep isn’t usually factored into ecosystem understanding at all and leads to the core mistakes that are difficult to adjust for: no wolves or lynxes.
Those social systems
We need not to pretend we know how to manage social systems. The war on drugs is into half a century and trillions of dollars and has made the situation worse: in the US for drug users, in countries that supply drugs and have their economies distorted out of all reason, in the prevalence of organised crime networks, in the young lives trashed when they are used to carry drugs. No one will ever apologise or learn the lessons.
Or we could go to Greta Thunberg and her complaint that the adults are destroying the future of the upcoming generations. She is absolutely right. We don’t have anyone in the governance space of trying to balance the rights of generations and the issue has blown up in our faces. Just imagine someone in the UK trying to play that card on Brexit. Clearly, old people voted disproportionately for a Brexit that will affect them least and, clearly, young people voted for remain because it is their futures. A governance intervention would ask how to start to balance that question. But no-one can get to governance questions because questions of government have been forced to dominate the agenda even though they are irrelevant.
That is the spirit of Smith’s First Law. We don’t need these people who don’t know what governance is. Somehow we have to recognise when FIFA is destroying the game of football and Doris is destroying civil society and cohesion. We literally cannot afford the ignorance. We need to mention the L-word that so confuses us: leadership. A leader can mitigate our ignorance but sooner or later we need to deal with the ignorance itself. Almost all the time, what counts for leadership in our society leads us deeper into ignorance by creating the illusion of simplicity. That Brexit bus, the infamous bus that was so obviously a lie. Remember: no part of a system can manage the system.
In our recent blog post, Passionate Science and the Trap of “Objectivity”, we wrote about projection and how what we do to others seems to be others doing it to us. If ever there was a concept that defines the trap we are in just now it is that one. We are persecuted and lied to by the people we persecute and lie to. Last week we described this as a vortex, a vortex that can consume everything we value and believe in. Next week we will go further into the neoliberal lie that there are scientific and philosophical procedures that can be used to generate results that are valid irrespective of their authors’ beliefs. And especially that there is an economic science whose results we can discuss in an ahistorical and culturally agnostic way.
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[1] Not a new corruption by any means: on BBC Woman’s Hour yesterday they ran a story about women’s football in the UK. A women’s team from a munitions factory in the First World War so upset the establishment with its popularity that a panel of doctors was lined up to say that women should not play football, and women were banned from playing on FA approved pitches for 50 years.
[2] Indeed, one reason for the extreme positions of the UK’s Conservative party is to be found in its dwindling membership — only a relatively radical right core remain as party members to guide their official policy, with fewer than 160,000 people eligible to elect the next Prime Minister for a nation of 67 millions. In an interesting contrast during their parallel leadership contests, Conservative Party members must have at least 3 months under their belt in order to get a vote, whereas the Liberal Democrats are still soliciting new members with the view to getting the broadest support for the new leader. The Labour party boasts the most members of any UK political party, bolstered perhaps by union members, and still has only half a million. Contrast to the anti-Brexit marches that attract 320–400,000 people (independently verified) in and around London.
[3] In the small, this is a commons, a resource managed by and for a community through a set of interdependent and locally sensitive customs and relationships.
[4] Wilful blindness through obsessive legibility? As we’ve rehearsed before, even the desire to make things clear increases the fragility of the ecosystem.
[5] International sports parallel: here in the US, the venerable golf Open is in full swing and it seems that there’s ongoing challenge between golf and the USGA…
[6] Arguably it’s self-governing, after a fashion, but POSIWID tells us that it’s not going towards a good place… You need to hold onto the notion of healthy ecosystems in order to talk about sustainable self-governance.
[7] For a glorious year, early in my career, my boss abdicated his position as chief architect, preferring to work his way down the tree back towards being a happy-go-lucky programmer, leaving the organisation without a successor and me without a boss…
[8] Equally, I always hope that the people who protest outside of abortion clinics also protest outside the IVF clinics, on the ground that interference is interference…
[9] There’s a herd somewhere (Aidan may remember) that is slowly dying for lack of predators. But introducing predators is seen as cruel, so by default we choose to kill all of them slowly rather than some of them vividly.
