Patience, Grasshopper

The pathologisation of planning

Forethought and prudence are the proper qualities of a leader.

-Tacitus, Annales XIII

Modern government is increasingly characterised by a conflicted relationship with the future.

On the one hand, our rulers are ever more fixated on a vision of themselves as having control over events which have not yet come to pass - they can both predict what is going to happen if they do nothing and decide what ought to happen instead, often through the imposition of goals and targets. The paradigm example of this, as you will remember, was the Covid-19 era, during which - often from hour to hour - predictions were continually being made with respect to trends in the number of ‘cases’, deaths, contacts, spare beds in hospitals, and so on, and restrictions introduced accordingly in order to ‘stop the spread’.

But this pattern repeats itself in almost every aspect of what the State nowadays does. Hence, to use a much more humdrum example, the UK government ‘knows’ that we face a future of increased pressure on the NHS due to a less active population, and rising temperatures due to carbon emissions. And so it has set out something called the Cycling and Walking Investment Strategy to ensure that ‘50% of all journeys in towns and cities [are] walked or cycled by 2030’ and ‘make walking and cycling the natural choices for shorter journeys, or as part of a longer journey by 2040’.¹ This will, it seems, make us healthier and more environmentally friendly, and thus stave off the gloomy future which awaits if we continue on our present course.

Modern government, in other words, functions largely through claims to be able to anticipate possible futures, and to be able to close off the possibility of undesirable such possible futures arising through wise planning and leadership.

On the other hand, however, it necessarily follows that the population are discouraged from doing the same thing. We are not supposed to be able to predict for ourselves what might unfold, and we are certainly not supposed to be able to plan accordingly. We, rather, are supposed to rely on the State to do that for us, and to therefore generally concentrate our attention on our immediate impulses and urges. We are supposed to live in the moment, and indeed give nary a moment’s thought to the future that might unfold before us.

This takes place across three different axes.

The first is the quiet but ever more forceful way in which we are given the impression that there is something undesirable about the most basic and important activity which human beings engage in when planning for the future - saving their money. This is something which the modern State does not like us to do, although it never tells us so explicitly. It rather implies it through the actions it takes, or reveals it in behind-closed-doors circumstances where the general population cannot be expected to be eavesdropping.

The most elementary ways in which the State discourages saving are indeed so elementary that most people consider them to be entirely natural and inevitable - the existence of unemployment benefits, the state pension, taxpayer-funded student loans, socialised healthcare, and so on, which eliminate many of the reasons why households might otherwise be incentivised to save.

People are slightly more cognisant, although not that much more cognisant, of the extent to which taxation also discourages saving. If one spends one’s pay each month, one is taxed once (twice if one includes VAT). But if one saves or invests it, one is taxed in multiple whammies on capital gains, interest, dividends, and so on - and, if one saves enough that one has a nice nest egg to pass on to one’s children, through inheritance tax too.

Factor in inflation and the debasing of the currency through quantitative easing and the message becomes clearer yet - it is subtle, but communicated to us highly effectively. Why save when your savings will have less value than the money you could spend today? And lest it be thought that this message is not to some extent deliberately being sent, I direct you to two previous posts (here and here) that you may find illuminating.

The second axis concerns the means by which we able to make judgments for ourselves about the future. Our age, as you will no doubt have noticed, is characterised by a deep concern on the part of government with the control of ‘narratives’ through the obsessive interest it takes in suppressing ‘misinformation’, ‘disinformation’, ‘malinformation’ and so on. We all know this is the case and we do not lack for analyses of how it takes place, but we do not often think very hard about why it is happening.

The reasons are no doubt multifaceted, but it seems plain to me that the desire to control the ‘information’ which the population consumes is as much about the desire to be the single source of predictive power as it is to be the ‘single source of truth’; it is the means through which the population are discouraged from aggregating information for themselves and ordering their affairs accordingly - and through which the state arrogates for itself the possession of wisdom and foresight. To repeat, our task is to live in the moment, and this necessarily requires us to turn our faces away from the future and leave that matter to those who are expert. Since allowing us to air our own views and notice trends for ourselves would undermine that future-oriented expertise, our ability to do so must be suppressed.

The third axis is the instability of our political, legal and economic circumstances. To make the State laugh, show it your plans - it can at any moment change its mind and devastate them. At the time of writing, British politics is wracked by a breakdown in relations between the Labour government and farmers, after the government all of a sudden decided to make changes to so-called Agricultural Property Relief. Where previously farmers had expected to be exempt from inheritance tax, they will now be subject to it - with the effect that many inheritors of family farms will be forced to sell them in order to be in a position to fund a 20% levy on the value of the estate.

The result is, naturally, discombobulation and chaos for farmers themselves. And this is mirrored by further discombobulation and chaos in other sectors of the economy due to other unforeseen changes which the government has ushered in - including, for example, an unexpected rise in the National Insurance contributions that will have to be made by employers. But this is, of course, an entirely normal state of affairs in late modernity, an era in which the relationship between individual and State is characterised by unpredictability and change; the individual is unable to orient him- or herself to the long term, because there is no long-term in any meaningful sense. Nobody knows how conditions will change from moment to moment - and nobody is therefore in a position to plan effectively five, ten or twenty years hence. All that is for certain is that it is the State which will be the main vector of change - change that is inevitable for all that it is entirely unpredictable which direction it will go.

Put all of this together and the position becomes clear. While the State knows the future, understands it, and has the wisdom and foresight to be able to control it, the individual is at the mercy of the future, lacks the capacity to think in the long-term, and has no ability to position him- or herself in a future-oriented way through prudent planning. And this appears therefore to be a large part of the basis on which the former rules over the latter - the State is entitled to govern because it possesses a command over the future which the individual lacks.

This calls to mind a passage in Alexandre Kojève’s writings on authority which I have previously mentioned. In The Notion of Authority, Kojève gives us a vision of the ‘Aristotelian’ justification for authority, which revolves specifically around this dichotomy between the State, which has a plan for the future, and the individual, who definitionally does not:

[T]he Master has the right to exercise an Authority over the Slave because he can anticipate, whereas the latter only notices immediate needs and is guided exclusively by these. It is therefore, if we like, the Authority of the ‘intelligent’ over the ‘unthinking’, of the ‘civilised’ over the ‘barbarian’, of the ‘ant’ over the ‘grasshopper’, of the ‘clear-sighted’ over the ‘blind’.

I have discussed the political philosophy of barbarians before. More provocative and I think, in its own way, more revealing is the political philosophy of the ant - or, perhaps more accurately, the political philosophy of the ant-grasshopper dialectic. Let me explain.

You will probably be familiar with Aesop’s fable of the ant and the grasshopper, at least if you sit and scratch you head for a few moments. But if you have done that and still drawn a blank, the tale concerns a grasshopper (originally apparently a cicada) which spends all summer and autumn singing and dancing, only to find it has no store of food to last the winter. Suddenly finding itself at risk of starvation, it begs for food from the ant, who has been carefully labouring away all year to store food for the future. In the original version, the ant rebukes the grasshopper and tells him to dance through the winter, too, with the implication that the grasshopper then dies; in modern childhood variants the friendly ant takes the grasshopper in and gives him food and shelter and he learns a valuable lesson about hard work. But either way the message is the same, and obvious.

The point Kojève was of course making was that the Aristotelian justification for authority is derived from a discourse which constructs the State as the ant and the citizen as the grasshopper - the State plans through the exercise of wise competence and in possession of superior soothsaying insight, and the citizen is by default foolish, flightly, and incapable of governing his own affairs or planning for the long-term. And it is therefore both inevitable and necessary that sooner or later the stupid, lazy grasshoppers are going to have to come begging to the ant for succour. And the ant, knowing the future and having planned prudently for it, will naturally be in a position to provide aid.

It will be noted that the message which the ant-State sends here is double-edged. On the one hand the State is needed to take care of all of the exigencies of human life because the citizen is presumptively blind to the future. It is, therefore, benevolent. But on the other hand there is also an implicit threat being made: without me, the State says to the citizen, you would be out in the cold starving at the mercy of the elements. It is a good job I’m around to make sure that doesn’t happen. And you’d better mind your Ps and Qs if you want to be able to rely on my good will indefinitely - because I can just as easily cast you out into the winter to die. Hence the message, of course, which the current government is, transparently, sending to farmers and the owners of SMEs, traditional Tory voters: this is your punishment for being a recalcitrant grasshopper, plain and simple.

The reason why modern government increasingly takes on this pattern is not difficult to discern when seen in light of Kojève’s comments. The authority displayed by the ant over the grasshopper, by the ‘intelligent’ over the ‘unthinking’, by the ‘clear-sighted’ over the ‘blind’, is for Kojève the most basic and primal form of authority that exists, because it is not built on any pre-existing hierarchy or structure of command. It is the type of claim on authority that is made when one among a group of equals - a group of children at play, for instance - asserts dominance over the others by directing them with a crude vision or plan for the future: let’s raid the orchard/play hide-and-seek/go and pull Sarah’s hair/jump in the river. It is in other words the type of claim on authority that emerges when somebody with no inherent or established status decides that he or she is going to be the one in charge. In such circumstances that somebody must have a plan from moment to moment, and must be able to plausibly describe it as making life in some sense better than it would otherwise be, because otherwise he will return to his position of humdrum equality with everybody else.

It is no accident then that in late modernity the liberal urge to tear down hierarchies and create conditions of equality have produced the need to govern in this way. It is because governing in this way is what is needed to establish authority precisely when one equal decides that he is not going to be such an equal after all. He is going to assert dominance, and because he has no inherent status he must establish it through a claim to have a grasp on the future and a plan to reckon with it.

You will have noticed, because it is impossible not to notice, that our ‘elites’ are nowadays callow, shallow, narrow-minded and manifestly ill-equipped to govern. They are patently evidently lacking in what is normally meant by a sense of authority - and therefore patently evidently, in the most negative sense possible, just like you or I. We can see in their eyes that there is nothing special about them whatsoever. There is no reason why they should be in charge other than that they purport to have plans - they are precisely like the children in the playground who happen to possess the blithe self-confidence and brash assertiveness to direct the others in pursuit of some project or other, in the promise of goodies or fun or the avoidance of harm. And it is not difficult therefore to see why it is that they find the future so interesting, and why it is that it is so important to them that those they exert authority over should be so grasshopper-like.

This story can only end, of course, when the ant-grasshopper dialectic is resolved through the realisation that we are, all of us, possessing of both ant- and grasshopper-like impulses and that our lives are only improved through the cultivation of both in their proper place. Those who claim to rule may think of themselves as wise and prudent, but they are just as likely to be foolish and flighty; the citizen may be constructed as ‘unthinking’ and ‘blind’, but is perfectly capable in almost all cases of managing his- or her own affairs. This realisation, though, will likely dawn only when winter is passed and we can survey the aftermath - and this is yet another reason for believing that it is only through crisis that something better than our current circumstances can emerge.

1. As is so often the case these days in materials produced by civil servants, there is something wrong with the syntax in this sentence.