Evolutionary Kakistocracy

"Every high civilisation decays by forgetting obvious things"~ G.K. Chesterton

There are three questions currently preoccupying me. How did we get here? Where is here? And what happens next or at least soon? (There may also be a fourth question along the lines of “so what?” tucked in at the end and perhaps we will have time to address it. It may even be the most important question, who knows.)

Starting Pitchfork Papers four years ago was, as I explained to anyone who wanted to listen and probably many who didn’t, an exercise in figuring out what I was thinking in a world which appeared to demand I pick a side, be able to argue robustly, passionately even, and have a unifying theory of everything based on immutable first principles. I found myself unprepared for the fist fight that the COVID pandemic episode morphed into. The pandemic response appeared to pit the people running everything against an amorphous highly distributed caste of resistors with the broad masses making up about 80% of the population more or less cowed into obedience and doing what the upper tier of leaders demanded of them unquestioningly. Writing seemed to be the only way to make sense of the muddle of values, principles and perspectives that until then I had only been aware of vaguely in the background, as sort of programming language of beliefs that had determined the rough trajectory of my life and work without ever intruding too far into concious decision making to become visible and recognizable.

My Christian faith, my acknowledgement of the benefits, both personal and societal, of a free market system based on property rights and the rule of law, and my understanding that there existed a constitutional framework (unwritten whilst I was in the UK, codified and fundamental in the German Grundgesetz in the decades I was living there and equally codified and fundamental here in Ireland in this country’s constitution) that was sacrosanct and allowed me to get on with the job of life whilst protecting my “inalienable rights” of free speech, integrity of person and other freedoms were the tacit framework within which I organised my existence.

I was not specifically political, not inflamed with consuming passion for some cause or other and therefore naturally conservative within social systems (in three different countries, four if you count the inordinate amount of - enjoyable and productive - time I spend in the US) in which most of the big questions seem to have been settled and in which there existed competing institutions who, whilst not always demonstrating pristine behaviour on an individual basis, could more or less be relied on to keep each other in check: The media saw its main task as speaking truth to power and delighting in exposing politicians either with their pants down (generally from the Right) or with their hands in the till (generally from the Left); the police were broadly representative of the indigenous culture (laissez-faire in the Anglosphere, efficient, meticulous and unsmiling in the Teutosphere); the courts were dependably independent; the civil service whilst acknowledged to be inefficient were at least assumed to be acting in their respective country’s best long term interests whilst the politicians were recognised as being broadly incompetent but bound at least by defined standards of normative behaviour (such as being at least desirous of balancing the budget and repaying debt assumed and taking personal responsibility for lapses in judgement or departmental disasters as ministers / Secretaries).

For many, the COVID pandemic response changed the comfortable concept of a benign balance of power between the various previously deemed independent beams of the national superstructure irreparably and gave rise to an initially uneasy and then visceral fear that the previous paradigm had been altered radically. At least to me it appeared as if the compact between citizen and state had been broken and reframed without any discussion or negotiation having taken place. When a member of Germany’s Constitutional Court felt empowered to tell his countrymen that “whilst their constitutional rights had not been cancelled (“aufgehoben”), they were currently unable to exercise them (“ausüben")”, the question became not if something had changed but how bad and irreversible it had become. Four years later that question is looming larger than ever and thoughtful participants in the game of life appear to be asking the questions I posited above in greater number. I would appear that at least for those looking hard at the evolution of our liberal democratic system and applying their analytical framework to it, as if the evolutionary DNA of our body politic is being decoded in ways that were never possible before, for the simple reason that the experiment has never been allowed to run this long in a more or less peacetime environment.

There are three essays to which my attention has been drawn in the past weeks and which I commend to you. They each provide a different but not mutually exclsuive answer to the questions of how did we get here and what is “here”? I have found each one of them useful in supplying a particularly clear perspective on the status quo and taken together offer a useful picture of the hole which might better help us frame an idea of where and how this ends and what follows.