“Seriously awful governments” should be ranked alongside global warming, mass extinction, conflict and economic inequality that now threaten all our lives and those of our fellow creatures. Almost all countries suffer from oppressive, cruel, and destructive leadership some of the time. Some have suffered most of the time.
A question of pathocracy?
In particular, world history is dominated by people who by normal standards – the standards by which most of us live – are monsters. In my lifetime these have included Stalin, Hitler, and the lesser lights of Mussolini, Franco, Salazar, Ceausescu, Pinochet, and numerous African dictators including Idi Amin.
The present crop includes Putin, Xi Jinping, Netanyahu, Assad, Min Aung Hlaing, Kim Jong Un, various oil sheikhs and Donald Trump (he could well make a come back). It’s amazing how much time humanity spends not on looking after ourselves and our fellow creatures and generally trying to make the world a better place, but in fending off the excesses of a few weird individuals who might reasonably be classified as psychopaths.
Britain for whatever reason has not so far suffered anyone that I can think of who was or is quite as awful as those listed above. But the dire state of Britain right now tells us that Conservative Party rule these past 13 years has fallen far short of what is really needed. All the necessary infrastructure of civilised life can properly be said to be in crisis. The state of the natural world is sad beyond measure. We still have the fifth or sixth largest economy in the world but the poor continue to get poorer and the gap between rich and poor – and between rich and super-rich – grows ever wider.
Outstanding government mistakes by both the major parties in recent memory include the botched partitioning of India in 1947 and the Suez crisis in 1956. The election of Margaret Thatcher in 1979 led us and the world into the age of neoliberalism – an economy based on self-centred, ultra-materialistic acquisitiveness in which the prime virtue is to compete as ruthlessly as necessary for material advantage. The invasion of Iraq in 2003 was misguided to the point of wickedness, followed a few years later by George Osborne’s age of austerity, Brexit, and now the callous mishandling of immigration culminating in the plan to whizz people off to Rwanda.
Although close observers say otherwise, our government has decreed that Rwanda is safe and eminently desirable, a tropical version of Butlin’s indeed, and what our government chooses to believe is, we are assured, ipso facto the case. As the Bellman says in Lewis Carroll’s The Hunting of the Snark:
“I have said it thrice/ What I tell you three times is true.”
In response, many serious thinkers these past few hundred years (and doubtless for many centuries before) have advocated anarchism — which doesn’t simply imply lawlessness as is commonly assumed but literally means “no formally appointed leader”. Thus in 1900 after a lifetime under the tsars, Leo Tolstoy, no less, in his essay On Anarchy declared that:
“The Anarchists are right in everything; in the negation of the existing order, and in the assertion that, without Authority, there could not be worse violence than that of Authority under existing conditions.”
And until his death in 1910 Tolstoy was something of a mentor to the young Gandhi, the future Mahatma, and champion of what became known as civil disobedience.
Why do we put up with it?
The 64 trillion dollar question is – how come? How is that today, with all our powers of communication, almost universal literacy, and the widespread, ostensible enthusiasm for democracy, we in Britain and humanity as a whole put up with such truly dreadful leadership? Why indeed do we as humanity – 8.5 billion people – allow ourselves and our fellow creatures to be held in the balance by the ambitions and excesses of a handful of seriously anomalous men (and sometimes of women)? I do not presume to offer a definitive answer but I would like to offer a few thoughts.
First, we are mammals, and furthermore we are primates. Many or most mammals, like many if not most animals, are social beings, for the simple reason that the advantages of living in groups often or usually outweigh the drawbacks. Pace Tolstoy, groups generally do better when they have clearly defined leaders (provided they are reasonably sensible and responsible leaders). As all human societies have found, democracy is difficult. As Churchill said:
“Democracy is the worst form of government, apart from all the others.”
Some mammalian groups practice some forms of democracy up to a point, and so it is that alpha-male, ‘silverback’ gorillas, though hugely impressive and apparently autocratic, are put firmly in their place by the sorority of senior females if they overstep the mark. But most animal societies rely on alpha individuals (not always males) nonetheless.
Some people hate to think that their thoughts and attitudes are shaped to any significant degree by our evolution and are rooted at least in part in our genes, but the fact seems inescapable. So it is that most of us don’t go round sniffing lamp-posts; not because it is socially unacceptable but because we are not dogs and have not inherited doggy predilections. Pragmatically, too, we tend unconsciously for reasons deeply embedded in our biology to follow Hilaire Belloc’s advice to his young friend James, which was:
“ … always keep a hold of nurse/ for fear of finding something worse.”
Indeed we seem inclined to go on clinging even when the nurse is obviously misguided or indeed is demonstrably insane.
Then there is the logistic problem: the people who are most likely to achieve the status and wealth needed to attain power are the ones who want it most. And the people who crave power and kudos most ardently are, in general, not the kind of people who ought to be in charge. For as Jesus said (according to St Mark (10: 42-44):
“ … whoever would be great among you must be your servant, and whoever would be first among you must be slave of all.”
The necessary virtues it seems are those of compassion and humility – not the kind of qualities we associate with the Putins of this world.
Then of course there’s the problem that the Catholic historian and statesman Lord Acton drew attention to in a letter to an Anglican bishop in 1887:
“Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”
Indeed, only a few saintly individuals avoid this trap, including most conspicuously in recent years, South Africa’s Archbishop Desmond Tutu. If only there were more Tutus! Actually there are a lot – most typically to be found among teachers, doctors, nurses, care-workers, and indeed priests and rabbis and imams, though in truth they may pop up anywhere. But the would-be Tutus tend to remain below the radar, precisely because they prefer not to be too conspicuous. Tutu came to prominence only by dint of extraordinary historical circumstance – and he rose spectacularly to the challenge.
Although our own government is unquestionably awful and incompetent it is positively evil only in parts. Yet, I suggest, there’s a more immediate, practical problem. Our leaders, and indeed most people in positions of influence, are very badly educated.
Coming soon: Part 2
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