An Old Prospectus

Three, or four, or five years ago, I can't remember exactly, I had the idea for a magnum opus, which, considering the number of such projects I've dreamed up, I'll probably never write.  But it might not hurt to leave a record of it here, in case (a) it has some merit even in unwritten/prospectus form, (b) I might return to it, in which case it will be useful to recall my thoughts.  It was to be in five parts:

I. Borders.  Part of this philippic against borders has been written and is posted here.  It begins:

A border is a visible line on a map that creates an invisible line on the surface of the world.  Indeed, in geometric terms, it is a plane that runs through the surface of the world, for it governs not only the land, but also airspace and underground mineral rights.

Some borders at least correspond with visible features of the landscape, such as rivers or mountain ranges.  But there are thousands and thousands of miles of virgin steppe, jungle, or desert, where the eye can recognize no change or discontinuity, yet human laws insist that these blades of grass, these mosquito-laden waters, these sand formations, belong to one nation-state, those to another.  In principle, these invisible lines are so precise that blades of grass, blowing in the wind, transgress international borders hundreds of thousands of times every day. 

But the grass is free to do so.  Wind and rain, birds and beasts may cross these lines at will.

People, however, are forbidden to do so, unless they have the permission of the two governments concerned.  Thus people contrive, through their own legal and cartographical ingenuity, to be, of all mobile objects, the least free...

I conclude the introduction by stating that "these strange entities [borders]... are the chief source of injustice in the world today."  In Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville argued that democracy was the inevitable future, and in one way he was more right than most people today realize, because what he meant by democracy was less freedom and elections than social equality, and social equality was just as characteristic of democracy's great 20th century rival, communism, and to a lesser extent even of fascism and Islamism (which have their master races but despise traditional aristocrats and elites), as it is of liberal democracy.  Tocqueville did not foresee these manifestations of the egalitarian revolution (though they may be foreshadowed in his fear of "tyranny of the majority") but they nonetheless, in combination with the spread of liberal democracy, prove him the prophet.  However, while intra-national social equality has become the norm, a new form of inter-national inequality, enforced by those strange entities, "borders," has emerged.  Today's aristocrats are not dukes and lords, but the American- and European-born. 

But what are borders?  A modern border is very little like the borders of the ancient Roman empire, which simply marked the limit of the territory within which Roman armies could reliably dominate.  Today's world is full of states that could not exercise effective military independence.  Many states have hosted American troops for decades yet are still considered sovereign; and so they are, but the fact is nonetheless indicative of how the meaning of sovereignty has changed.  States interpenetrate each other by all manner of subtle extraterritorialities: commercial contracts, trade treaties, military alliances, passports, foreign aid with conditionality, election monitoring, human rights treaties, the International Criminal Court, the United Nations, US-led interventions in Kosovo, Iraq, East Timor, etc. 

Considered in toto, all these justify the thought-experiment of regarding the world order not as many nation-states, but as a single "Empire," as Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt called it in their book of that name.  My point is not that the world is a single state, nor that it is not; that is semantics.  There is a system of explicit and implicit rules, championed and designed and published and executed by persons variously organized into national and transnational governmental and non-governmental bodies, overlapping and interacting with each other in complex ways, and having behind them in varying forms and degrees the threat of coercive force.  The familiar many-state paradigm is of considerable use in understanding this world system, but at other times is imperfectly applicable.  An "Empire" paradigm would be useful in different ways.  Neither is wholly true, and of the two, the many-state paradigm is probably "truer," i.e., the more useful conceptual tool.  But the "Empire" paradigm is probably more relevant now than a hundred years ago, or fifty, or twenty, and seems to be growing more relevant all the time.

If we look at the world through the Empire paradigm, it becomes immediately apparent that the world constitution privileges some people to lives very likely to be prosperous and free and full of opportunity, and condemns others to dire poverty on the basis of birth.  It is not merely that some parents are more able and willing to provide for their children than others, though this is one cause of diverging fortunes in life (though its effects are difficult to distinguish from those of personal choices) within countries.  Rather, it is the result of deliberate policies adopted by this world's governments to restrict the movements of persons, trapping most of the world's population in poor countries, and insulating the rich from the guilt of seeing others poor.

I planned to make this argument while surveying the world's borders and the history of borders generally.  The conclusion-- that borders are an instrument of class oppression-- is obvious enough: I suspect that every thinking person in the rich world knows this and has a bad conscience about it at some level.  But here's the segue into the rest of the book: how could we maintain order without these strange entities, these instruments of injustice, these borders?  What would be the use of opening the borders if the result was simply to ruin the economy and society of the rich world, to kill the proverbial golden goose, impoverishing ourselves without enriching anyone else? 

II. The Bible and the Bees. In this chapter, I would overview a long intellectual contest between "the Hebrew theory of national prosperity" and "the parable of the bees."  According to the Hebrew theory of national prosperity-- I call it Hebrew because I distill it from the Bible, but it has analogs in many cultures besides the Jewish-- the nation prospers whenever it is virtuous, and falls into decline and ruin because of sin.  In the "parable of the bees"-- based on Mandeville's poem-- it is greed that makes the nation prosper; and much of modern economics consists of an effort to create "systems so perfect that people don't need to be good" (I heard Mark Twain said that but I've never been able to find the quote).  I would compare the evidence and come down on the side of the Hebrew theory, partly by invoking the idea of social capital, and more generally by looking at the role that the virtues-- frequently uncompensated-- have played in the West's success and in the functioning of advanced economies and the progress of science.  The implication is that if we supplement our institutions with generous conduct and other virtues, we (it would be too long to explain what I mean by we here...) can adapt to the new strains that will be caused by dealing with the strange entities, borders, as justice demands, and emerge from it... what? stronger? "better off"? happier? 

III. Man Does Not Live by Bread Alone.  What is happiness?  What is the good life for man?  This chapter critiques the most systematic and cogent answer made to that question in our times: the spokesman of this answer is the discipline of economics.  I once wrote a version of the argument in a long comment over at EconLog.  The argument is basically that economists are "prisoners of the food metaphor," always talking about "consumption," and they thereby distract themselves from the wider range of human enjoyment that can't well be interpreted as consumption.  In fact, economists' utility theory-- which begins with assumptions about "completeness," "transitivity," and "nonsatiation" of preferences, and then proceeds by a method of "revealed preference" to discern "utility functions" that characterize individuals' behavior-- is logically sound, but has a subtle weakness in applicability.  Utility could in principle be discovered by a sort of infinite interview, but it is not feasible to conduct such an interview.  Fortunately, money conducts the interview for us!  People are faced with myriad choices every day, and we can observe these choices and make deductions about preferences therefrom.  And yet money conducts the interview in a biased and tendentious way, for there is no reason that people's preferences should be confined to things that can be bought with money.  In fact, we can describe many "economies," each one characterizing the patterns and interactions that emerge from the pursuit of some particular good: economies of status; economies of sex; economies of morality; economies of truth; economies of aesthetics and the appreciation of beauty; etc.  So while one must admire economists' valiant attempt to reduce the good life for man to an index, and while much that is of use may have been learned along the way, the quest is not ultimately successful and cannot succeed.

IV. The Anglosphere Renaissance.  My attention would have shifted here to contemporary history, and in particularly to a phenomenon I would call "the Anglosphere Renaissance."  Britain and the US, past superpowers and examples to the world, which looked like half-broken has-beens in the late 1970s, experienced a renaissance beginning around 1980 which I expected then (a few years back) to last until about 2020-- that still seems likely enough.  The Anglosphere did not recover its pre-eminence of relative power or territorial extent.  Rather, it experienced a cultural renaissance, as it became suddenly the admiration of the world in terms of its political and economic organization, its popular culture, and its ideas, ideology, and values.  Liberal democracy and free-market economics spread worldwide and were regarded almost universally as the ideal.  The English language also became universal.  I compared 9/11 to the sack of Rome in 1527: a shattering world-historic event, perpetrated by a mob of religious fanatics who despised the intellectual innovations of the renaissance (Lutherans and jihadists, respectively) that exposed the vulnerability of the heartland of the renaissance, and led to a sort of change of mood, to political reaction and intellectual retreat.  The Italian Renaissance would have ended anyway in the sense that it was ceasing to be Italian: the genius of the Renaissance was spreading to northern Europe and beyond.  But that genius was partly extinguished, or at any rate went into a sort of abeyance, during the Reformation and Counter-Reformation.  After 9/11, we were threatened with the same: a sanctimonious unity at home that smothered dissenting voices; a new spree of "realist" partnerships with dictators who would ally with us against terrorism; a deafness to critiques associated with bin Laden even if-- as in the case of troops in Saudi Arabia or sanctions on Iraq-- they were just; while meanwhile the discontents of the earth, confronted with a united, legitimist, but weakened West, would begin to look to the West's enemies for models.  Bush got us out of this trap almost single-handedly, shattering the scary post-9/11 mood of consensus at home, displaying the West's strength in Afghanistan (and destroying the reputational capital al-Qaeda won in 9/11), and then, in Iraq, launching a revolution, and a debate about that revolution and about its meaning, that would leave sovereigntist legitimism orphaned.  At home, Bush's revolution triggered a sort of democratic revival, as election turnouts and political activism surged.  What is remarkable is that the Anglosphere was doing rather well out of the sovereigntist world order.  Bush and Blair's revolution seems to have been motivated by abstract principles of justice, by a belief in eliminating tyranny in the world; it seems to have been idealistic and altruistic to a degree rare in incumbent hegemons.

V. The Succession.  In this chapter I was going to outline a world-- a coming world, perhaps, a plausible scenario-- in which the strange entities, borders, were ameliorated.  But I don't feel too motivated to remember what I was planning to write since rehashing the prospectus makes it clear to me that it wouldn't be a good idea to try to execute the old project.  I can't understand myself how Part III was supposed to proceed to Part IV.  The justification for putting Part II and Part III after Part I seems tenuous.  To the extent that I was trying to outline deep principles of society and of the political life of man, so as to answer fears that to abandon those strange entities, borders, would simply lead to chaos, I don't see how the effort could have been successful.  Maybe if I had actually written the book then it would have held together, and I've simply forgotten-- or perhaps, no longer believe-- some key parts of the argument.  Certainly I couldn't write it now in that form, and have better things to do than try.  The old prospectus is a stash of ideas that can be recombined and developed into new projects.  For all that, it might still be as good a summary of what I believe, as it relates to politics in the broadest sense, as anything I've ever thought up.

The old prospectus was also partly why I started blogging: wanting to get my ideas out, and seeing no possibility of regular publication in the foreseeable future, I tried to express them in a blog.  Which led to one thing and another...