Government for Dummies

Rationalism in Politics in 2024

[T]he unhappy society, with an ear for every call, certain always about what it ought to think (though it will never for long be the same thing), in action shies and plunges like a distracted animal.

-Michael Oakeshott, ‘The Tower of Babel’

The population of the UK was greeted with encouraging news the other week, when a man who once declared himself to ‘never allow [himself] time to stop and have a discussion with [himself']’, to not have a favourite novel or poem, to never dream, and to have ‘never really thought about’ whether he is an optimist, pessimist, introvert or extrovert, stood up on a stage and said he would deliver ‘a country with more control’, characterised by ‘decisive government’, which would ‘be better managed’.

The two things - the robotic denial of an interior life, and the obsession with ‘control’ - are, of course, related. People who are intellectually two-dimensional see the world in two-dimensional terms: not as a rich and complex whole with which one tinkers at risk of unintended consequences, but as a pattern or schema that can be understood through a cursory examination. And, when in government, they therefore fool themselves into believing that politics is a matter, basically, of flowcharts: if X, then do Y, and Z will follow.

Understanding our current government, then, is in this sense really not a matter of complicated political philosophy. These people just aren’t very thoughtful, and as a result they embrace a coldly mechanistic understanding of the universe. It is not exactly a matter of a lack of intelligence; it is rather the kind of blinkeredness that descends over somebody who has never spent very much time engaging with, and reflecting on, the world’s ineluctable complexity. It is, in this reading, not so much a problem of ideology or philosophy as it is just a character flaw writ large across government. Sir Keir Starmer and his cronies don’t think very deeply - or very much.

Nonetheless, there is a philosophical aspect to the problem, and we get a window onto that through Michael Oakeshott’s ‘Rationalism in Politics’, probably the finest single essay on the subject of politics written in the 20th century. In it, Oakeshott identifies the basic problem at the root of all many of our ills: the privileging of technical over practical knowledge. The former he identifies with the application of rules and instructions so as to achieve objectives - the kind of knowledge that can be encoded in a cookbook or a piece of sheet music. The latter is the type of knowledge that comes from doing - and which definitionally cannot be encoded, because it is intuitive and tacit. Where technical knowledge provides a recipe, practical knowledge is found in the wisdom of an accomplished chef who knows how to make a meal taste good because he has made thousands of them and carefully trained his palate.

Oakeshott describes essentially all human practices as being composed of these two types of knowledge, and he naturally includes politics. Politics is partly a technical matter - one needs to ‘know’ things in the sense of data, rules, procedure, etc. - and partly an intuitive process that is driven by experience. Our problem is that we have come to see it purely in the technical sense as the means by which objectives are achieved. And the consequence is that we have come to understand politics in the same terms as we would understand cooking if all we had were cookbooks. We imagine that making a political dish is just a matter of following recipes. To achieve outcome Z, do a certain amount of X, and then Y, with a dash of ABC. We forget that politics is as much a matter of judgment and ‘gut’ feeling as it is pressing buttons and pulling levers. In seeking to achieve a political objective, one does not just tell the population to ‘jump’ and expect them to ask how high. One has to persuade, argue, reason, and lead. One has to, as Oakeshott put it, be a diplomat with respect to one’s own people. And one has to pursue one’s objectives in view of the cultural and societal context and the weight of history that always ineluctably bears down on any political decision-maker anywhere in the world at any time. One has to both give and take.

Oakeshott’s essay is beloved of libertarians, which is unusual, because it was actually the (I think) last serious and principled defence of pre-modern political thought by a proper philosopher. Oakeshott was essentially arguing that the matter of governing is best left to ‘experienced’ people who have been bred and educated for leadership, which is to say within the framework of traditional authority. Where the ‘politically inexperienced social classes’, as he puts it, ‘have risen to the exercise of political initiative and authority’ as they have over the ‘last four centuries’, they come to the power off the back of a lack of a proper political education. And this forces them to rely on ‘cribs’ (this being an old-fashioned English schoolboy expression for a cheat translation of a Latin or Greek text) - readymade ideologies and doctrines that can be easily imbibed and which superficially appear to tell them what to do in any given circumstance. These people prioritise technique, in other words, because they have no tradition or ‘habit’ of governing. And it is this of course that leads them to the extremism and absurdity of fascism, communism, etc.

This is not, importantly, merely a defence of aristocracy - of the toffs being in charge. There is something much deeper going on, which is a critique of political modernity as such. The clue comes - News from Uncibal regulars can now take a drink - in the passage of the essay in which Oakeshott comes to the subject of Machiavelli.

Machiavelli, for Oakeshott, was also a provider of cribs (i.e. The Prince and the Discourses on Livy): ‘a political training in default of a political education, a technique for the ruler who had no tradition’. And this is of course how Machiavelli describes his own project at the very start of The Prince, where he describes hereditary monarchs as basically uninteresting, since all they have to do is, in effect, to keep the ship of State afloat. The interesting ones, the people who actually need advice, and who are therefore his audience, are new princes - those who have conquered a new territory or freshly usurped power. As Oakeshott has it:

The well-established hereditary ruler, educated in a tradition and heir to a long family experience, seemed to be well enough equipped for the position he occupied; his politics might be improved by a correspondence course in technique, but in general he knew how to behave. But with the new ruler, who brought to his task only the qualities which had enabled him to gain political power and who learnt nothing easily but the vices of his office…the position was different. Lacking education (except in the habits of ambition), and requiring some short-cut to the appearance of education, he required a book….

The important point to bear in mind, then, is precisely the interest in newness. This is because the position of the ruler in late modernity is always, and ineluctably, new in the sense that moderns have gradually but inexorably abandoned any vestigial acceptance that either heredity, tradition or theology should be justifications for government. To moderns, standing now at the end stages of modernity, rulers absolutely cannot plead divine or natural right, or inheritance, as reasons why they should be in charge. And so they are always, definitionally, in this regard new. They always come to government fresh, like actors going on cold, because they never come from a position of having been embedded in a tradition or ‘habit’ of governing.

This means, obviously, that modern government is in turn always going to be Rationalistic in the Oakeshottian sense - or, perhaps more accurately, modern government is to be understood as the gradual unfolding over centuries of Rationalism in politics, for the simple reason that modern government was from its inception only ever going to end up being practiced by leaders who are in search of cribs: doctrines, ideologies, techniques that will show them ‘what to do’. To return to a familiar line, their position is always, by virtue of its newness, ‘fragile and morally questionable’. And, sensing their fragility, modern political leaders cling to whatever sets of ideas seem to them to have a plausible likelihood of making it seem as though they are ‘in charge’ or have some idea about what exactly it is they are supposed to be doing. They do not make policy because they have an instinct for what good policy would look like resulting from being inculcated into an ancient tradition. They rather make policy on the basis of things that clever-sounding people have said to them.

Modern government can therefore only really go in one direction, as Oakeshott well understood: a ‘training in ideology’ being substituted more and more for a political education as the position of traditional forms of authority becomes less and less dominant and eventually dissolves, and, following on from that, an ever-more dominant understanding that the job of the ruler is essentially to follow recipes so as to achieve objectives.

And hence we see a gradual dissolution of the capacity to govern, as all of the traditional forms of authority, which were not of course new, but which were not able to sustain themselves after being brought before modernity’s ‘tribunal of the intellect’, themselves disappear. And what follows from this, ultimately, are all of the absurdities and foolishnesses of politics in 2024, understood as a kind of culmination of this process, with governments floundering about pursuing lunatic policies of some stripe or another, generally on the basis of the thinnest, flimsiest of ‘cribs’ imaginable. Some experts say we need to reduce carbon emissions and somebody or other has produced a study saying that a target of 600,000 heat pump sales a year would be a good way of realising this, so let’s do that. Some experts say we need to reduce strain on the NHS, and a group of academics has done some research about taxing sugar and salt and minimum alcohol pricing; sounds like a plan. Some experts say we need more money to plug the hole in the public finances, and some university and think-tank funded wonks have been circulating a report about wealth taxes, so let’s consider that. And so on and so forth: government, as it were, for Dummies - all cribs, all the way down.

What emerges, then, is a picture of a political class who, despite their much-vaunted claims to be exercising ‘management’ and ‘control’, spend most of their time dashing this way and that in pursuit of some flight of fancy or other, and continually having to retreat in confusion and anger from patches of nettles or brambles they have accidentally blundered into. The idea that they might possess any genuine authority thereby becomes laughable: they are simply contemptuous and frivolous, and the population increasingly considers the fact that such lightweights are in charge to be outrageous - even offensive.

This explains a great deal about our predicament, then. Our main problem is not so much that Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour Party are in charge (although this is undoubtedly a problem); it is rather that the politicians we elect are, definitionally, disconnected from any inherent or intrinsic claim on legitimacy, and only therefore rise to and maintain a position of authority by claiming to be doing things. This, in turn, generally leads them to do very stupid things, because most of the things which a government has it in its power to do are stupid in the first place, and because most of the ideas which are put before government as wizard wheezes, and which politicians seize upon, are stupid too - typically being geared towards short-term, instrumental and quantitatively measurable goals.

What, then, is to be done? I hope it goes without saying that one does not have to conclude from what I have written here that it would be a good idea to turn the clock back to the mid-16th century, Oakeshott’s summum bonum of political achievement. The only way out of modernity is through it, as I have repeatedly tried in this Substack to show.

But it does mean that we have to think a bit more seriously about the matter of political education as such. The old Establishment are never going to be in charge again, and nor should they be. But we do have to acknowledge the signal virtue of traditional authority in all of its forms, which was, as Oakeshott was obliquely pointing out, that a governing framework founded on such a grounding had nothing to prove. It was there because it had always been there, or because it made a convincing claim (to the populace) to be deriving its status from divine or natural right. And, because it had nothing to prove, it was not driven to do things all the time. It could let things rest, and it could leave people alone. It could govern calmly.

Our politicians, whose role is founded precisely on the fact that they govern, are in the opposite position: they do indeed need to do things all the time. Oakeshott helps us to see that it is therefore inevitable that they will grow increasingly Rationalistic from government to government, and concomitantly more reliant on cribs - and therefore less competent. And we see the results of this rapidly advancing across our political landscape as we speak, with each generation of politicians appearing more brittle and empty than the last. Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour Party are already demonstrating themselves to be a kind of pinnacle - or nadir - of the headless-chicken modality of government to which Rationalism gives rise. But we haven’t yet seen what will come next.

The feeling is, then, I think, growing that we have for too long assumed that the problem of political education - in the sense in which Oakeshott meant it - in a democracy is one which will take care of itself. It patently is not so doing, and this is because of the ineluctable features of modernity that I have here identified. In short, since in modernity all governments are new, they are always going to have to rely on cribs, because the only way they can stake any claim on legitimacy is precisely on the basis of ‘doing things’. This reduces politics to a pale and faded simulacrum of what it really is - a sort of desperate, and despairing, scrabble for ideas.

Three possibilities therefore lie before us. One is to hope, and try, for a better quality of crib. In this respect it really matters that Sir Keir Starmer is such an ignoramus and that his Cabinet are such lightweights. (We haven’t even mentioned the bizarre man who now holds the power of life and death over energy security in the UK.) It might help if Starmer had an interest in books and in history and philosophy, or had lots of people around him who did, so that he could draw from a better class of technical wisdom and also perhaps imbibe some practical wisdom from those who in the past have thought very hard about what good governance looks like in light of experience. In this respect, of course, it is a great shame - leaving aside the question of ideological bias - that our universities have become so dominated by a thinly technocratic concept of what academic research is for (i.e., churning out vast quantities of cheap cribs for policymakers) and have lost any real sense of quality control or any real faith in the value of ideas. If politicians were better educated, or had people around them who were, this would in itself perhaps improve things.

The second possibility is to emphasise experience in politics. It is trite that most politicians nowadays come to power off the back of having done or achieved very little of practical significance, either in the world of politics or otherwise, and typically without having got their feet wet in local government first. This is not in itself such a clear-cut thing: Sir Keir Starmer, already revealing himself to be seriously out of his depth as Prime Minister, was in a previous life a very successful barrister and public prosecutor, though this doesn’t seem to have availed him of much in the way of political nous. But obviously being in charge of a large organisation, trying to help keep the streets in a locality free of dog muck, having held a military command, etc. - these are useful experiences with what I feel compelled to call ‘transferrable skills’. The fact that such people no longer seem to enter politics in sufficient number is not a problem that anybody can fix by pressing a button, but I am sure that as conditions deteriorate serious individuals who have achieved things will begin rolling up their sleeves and involving themselves in practical politics, because they will feel there is no alternative.

The third possibility, though, is much the worse one: that the electorate, eventually becoming sick of being governed by mediocrities who are incapable of making good decisions, communicating effectively, or treating the population like human beings, decide to take matters into their own hands and circumvent rule-by-cribs altogether through direct action. I by no means suggest anything as dramatic as an absolute overthrow of the governing order. But it is within living memory for serious civil strife to erupt in Britain, not in the form of spontaneous rioting but in the form of organised action by militant trade unions whose stated goal was to bring down the government itself. That trade unions would be the vector for direct action this time around seems unrealistic. But things could get as febrile - I think in fact much more febrile - than in the convulsions of the 1970s and early 80s, and in the context of much lower levels of social cohesion and social trust.

This kind of scenario would have seemed far-fetched even five or ten years ago, but it becomes less far-fetched by the month. History tells us that it is only possible to govern incompetently and mendaciously for so long before something breaks. We are a very long way from a serious downward spiral, but that distance feels like it is closing with a little too much rapidity for comfort. We can certainly hope that possibilities number one or two above are realised before number three becomes a realistic prospect. But - as startling as it is to find oneself admitting as much - I’m not absolutely confident about that. The next UK general election is in 2029, and an awful lot of very bad and painful things can happen in five years. Watch this space, because with a government this Rationalistic, there is everything to play for - in every sense.