Machiavelli's Bear Hunt

The only way out is through

Cover illustration, We’re Going on a Bear Hunt by Michael Rosen and Helen Oxenbury

It’s not dark yet, but it’s getting there.

-Bob Dylan

Across the West, people are in a bleak state of mind. This I think is one of the rare opinions that unites people across the political spectrum, and on both sides of our rumbling culture war: an inchoate sense that things are going quite rapidly downhill. On what is called ‘the left’ this tends to be associated with apocalyptic fears about the climate, about pandemics and other health concerns, or a resurgence of fascism. On ‘the right’, it appears in a generalised sense that entropy beckons: freedom, civility, competence, excellence, the sense of national belonging, all appear to be ebbing away at an alarming rate.

At such times inquiring minds naturally turn to the question of what is to be done. This is a dangerous question to ask. And it is also, in an important sense, a slightly misleading one. There are things that people who care about the future can do - and I will come to those things in due course. But the trajectory which we are on is, I am afraid to say, more or less fixed. This is because our problem is modernity itself, and the way in which it must, inevitably, play out. As the famous children’s book, We’re Going on a Bear Hunt, has it, we can’t go over it, we can’t go around it - we have to go through it. This is the bad news: things are going to get worse and worse. The good news, if I can put it that way, is that once we are through it, things will probably improve.

Let’s begin again then with Machiavelli. In Thoughts on Machiavelli, Strauss describes our friend Niccolo as having made the strongest and most effective statement on modernity itself, because he was writing at a time at which the pre-modern world was at its zenith. He straddled the division between those two épistémès, the pre-modern and modern, and therefore understood them both (and Michel Foucault would also indeed later describe him as a kind of bridge, or break between, the two). This means that when one unpacks his work one can find our present and future quite clearly mapped out - both where we are going, and what will go wrong - because we are of course rooted in modernity, and are seeing its consequences playing out before us.

At the heart of modernity (although Machiavelli would not of course have put it that way) is the basic tendency for human government to be tugged towards the rule of a prince, and ultimately from the prince to the tyrant. On this point, it is worth, if you are reading along, referring to Book I, Chapter X of the Discourses on Livy (but it is writ large across both the Discourses and The Prince). Here, Machiavelli presents us with a vision of what good governance will result in: ‘a world replete with peace and justice’ in which ‘everything work[s] smoothly and [is] going well’, and in which there is no ‘rancour’, no ‘licentiousness’, no ‘corruption’ and no ‘ambition’. Instead, there is only the ‘world triumphant, its prince glorious and respected by all, the people fond of him and secure under his rule’.

The obvious thing to observe about this is that in the first place this world is realised by the prince himself, and the prince is indeed necessary to that realisation. The people need a good prince who looks after them. And, implicitly, the prince justifies his own rule in the fact that he does this. This is made explicit in the same Discourse: ‘It will be found that Titus, Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian, Antoninus and Marcus [Aurelius] had no need of soldiers to form a praetorian guard, nor of a multiude of legions to protect them, for their defence lay in their habits, the goodwill of the people, and the affection of the senate’. They secured their reign, in other words, by being benevolent. This is contrasted with the reigns of those such as Caligula, Nero, Vitellius and ‘other bad emperors’ who had made enemies of their own people through their ‘bad habits and their evil life’ and generally met sticky ends as a result.

So far, so good: it seems that what Machiavelli is saying is that the rule of a good prince is necessary in order to secure ‘a world replete with peace and justice’, and that through being good a prince will ensure that he has the ‘goodwill’ of the people and can have a happy and long-lasting reign. But Machiaveilli does not end his analysis there. He goes on to raise a sociological point - perhaps the most important sociological point that can be made about the practice of modern government:

‘And, should a good prince seek worldly renown, he should most certainly covet possession of a city that has become corrupt, not, with Caesar, to complete its spoilation, but, with Romulus, to reform it. Nor in very truth can the heavens afford men a better opportunity of acquiring renown; nor can men desire anything better than this.’

Pay careful attention to what this means: if you want to rule, you must not just happen to be in charge of a city that has become corrupt - you must covet such a city as your possession. It is, the implication goes, better to be in charge of a corrupt city than a non-corrupt one, because then there is something for you to reform. A non-corrupt city doesn’t need reforming, and therefore as a putative ruler it’s very hard to present yourself as being the necessary means by which ‘peace and justice’ are realised. No: what you want, as a prince, is to secure the people’s ‘goodwill’ through making yourself the very method through which ‘peace and justice’ are secured. That is why you want to take charge of a corrupt city. It is because that is something you can work with so as to facilitate the means by which you cement your own rule.

The sociology of modern government - by which, in shorthand, I mean secular, rationalistic government (note how none of Machiavelli’s examples were Christian) - is thereby here made plain. What does the modern prince want? Well, since he does not have divine right to justify his position, it is a corrupt city that he can rule and reform. And since this is the basic dynamic, the exercise of modern government will consist chiefly in an endless, limitless search for ‘corruption’ so that the task of reform can be continually carried out. No modern ruler can ever be satisfied with the proposition that the people are not corrupt, and can just be left to their own devices accordingly; and no modern ruler can ever be satisfied that reform has gone far enough, and that now we can simply sit back and keep things ticking along. There must instead be a never-ending quest for new things to do, new goals to achieve, new methods to deploy, and new ways to govern.

The idea that this process can be reined in, let alone reversed, is therefore, I am sad to say, a misconception about the route that the path of modernity will necessarily take. Our problem is not ‘left’ (or indeed ‘right’) politics, or ‘wokeness’, or ‘hyperliberalism’, or anything so parochial as that. Those things are just symptoms, or epiphenomena, of the underlying cause. The problem is modern government itself, which necessarily does not only refuse to acknowledge limits, but actively and endlessly seeks to undermine and trample down limits (family, church, society, etc.) wherever they can be found. There may be speed-bumps on the route taken (the famously ‘laissez-faire’ 1840s; the Thatcher years, and so on) during which government takes its reformist impulses in libertarian directions, but those are few and far between and are rapidly overcome and reversed. You will I am sure have noticed that government’s endless search for new things to govern is now taking us into very strange places, as the contemporary obsession with totally normal features of the human experience - the menopause, men’s mental health (what we used to call things like ‘sadness’ and ‘loneliness’), the raising of children, and so on - shows. This will not be the end of the matter; far from it. The end of the matter is nothing other than the total government of every aspect of life: what can be said, done, and in the end, ideally, even thought - because it is only then that there will be truly no ‘corruption’ left to remedy.

What then is to be done?

The first thing is to recognise that we are, as it were, on rails, and that we can’t simply jump off the train, pull on the breaks, or make it go off in a different direction. But the second thing to realise is that, as I said, earlier, this is a process that can - and will - be got through. Let’s go back to the Discourses, and particularly Book I, Chapter LVIII, whose title in a way gives you everything you need to know: ‘The Masses are More Knowing and Constant than the Prince’. This is because in the end, notwithstanding everything Machiavelli earlier had to say about the rule of princes ushering in peace and justice, ‘government by the populace is better than government by princes’. Why? Well, it’s not because any individual person is better than any other. That’s precisely the point: nobody is better than anybody else, and sooner or later, ‘all do wrong’. But the good thing about the population is that there are an awful lot of them, and they are connected to and based in visceral reality in a more direct way than a prince could ever be. Where they make individual mistakes, they are consequently ‘of less moment and much easier to put right’. Where the prince, on the other hand, makes mistakes, disaster beckons: ‘there is no one to talk to a bad prince, nor is there any remedy except the sword’. When power is concentrated in a ruler, he may govern well for a time, but that time will come to an end as surely as eggs are eggs, and when it does the ‘lunacy’ will be truly catastrophic.

Machiavelli’s immanent critique of princely rule, then, is now clear. The prince promises to dispense peace and justice to a population which he necessarily imagines to be corrupt. But sooner or later he will end up doing the opposite, and things will go very badly wrong. Perversely, then, ‘in the future there is hope’, because after disaster there will be ‘freedom in the end’. A more simple way of putting even this is that although modern government tends towards totalitarianism, totalitarianism always goes awry. And when it does, goodness can and will emerge from the wreckage.

I will leave you to make up your own mind about how far along the path we are towards ‘lunacy’ and how bad the wreckage will be. (You mileage will vary depending on just how bad the politicians in charge are in the country in which you live.) But my money is on things deteriorating far more rapidly than the totalitarian vision which our rulers are grasping towards can be realised. Make no bones about it; when Jordan Peterson recently told the US Congress that we are waltzing towards dystopia, he was absolutely right in identifying the trajectory. But at the same time there is an air of unreality about the nightmarish vision which is presented to us by our own rulers: CBDCs; social credit systems; just transition; cradle-to-grave health and social care; total online and real-world safety from bullying, hate speech, and mental health problems; and so on and so forth. A collapse of some sorts is I think coming long before any of that can be realised (if you live in an urban environment in the developed world this will be plainly evident to you): the question for the middle-latter part of the 21st century will not therefore be how we can resist the creeping power of the state - though that is of course a pressing concern at the moment - but what we are to create from the rubble (hopefully metaphorical rubble) when the rotten edifice comes tumbling down.

Current trends will in other words not continue - and may indeed not continue for very long. As the old economists’ line goes, if something can’t go on forever, it will stop. The question is not if, but when, and how bad will it be when it does. Will Western Europe only get as bad as Argentina, at which point a Javier Milei figure may come along to make a more genuine claim to be reforming a ‘city’ in its corruption? Or will it get as bad as El Salvador, at which point a figure like Nayib Bukele may become necessary to appear? Or will it get worse even than that before things get better? I make no predictions in that regard, except to reiterate that we are on a path we must get through, rather than under or around.

In the interim, there are things that sensible and goodhearted people who want what is best for their family, community, society and country can of course do. The first is to think very carefully about your financial security over the long term, and that of your family: you should plan to have the wherewithal to withstand a severe economic downturn and a decline in living standards. The second is to build strong ties to your local community, or ideally to move to somewhere with strong community cohesion. Making your own local area a better, or at least more robust, place through volunteer work, and, if you are religious, go regularly to church, synagogue, mosque, etc. The third is to get involved with people who are making a different at the margins like the Free Speech Union or the many other charities and campaigning organisations who are trying to create the space within which a more humane politics can emerge. To use a cliched but important analogy, just because we can’t stem the tide does not mean we can’t rescue the stranded starfish who are within reach. The fourth thing is to conserve what can be conserved: human beings have created beautiful things in the past; we have each of us inherited a glorious tradition; it is something that we are duty-bound to pass on to our descendants. And the fifth, related to the fourth, is to keep good ideas alive, so that one day - to paraphrase Milton Friedman - when the rebuilding job begins, those ideas will be ‘lying around’ and ready to be picked up again and used.

Things will have to get worse before they get better, and we are I think, all of us, in for a degree of pain. The rational response is therefore to find ways to protect against the coming pain, lessen it where we are able, and ensure that we and the people we care about can survive through it to flourish in the aftermath. To all of this then can be added a sixth recommendation - to look after one’s soul and nourish oneself. Don’t spend too long online; visit natural places; maintain friendships and family relationships; create; read; listen to great music; eat good food and drink fine wines and spirits. Discerning between what’s good about life and what’s bad is in the end not so very complicated - and always keep in mind that we are, collectively, ‘more knowing and constant’ than those who purport to save us from our corruption.