By Dee Smith, CEO
Understanding corruption is difficult because often there are detectable trends and tendencies that go in more than one direction and can even seem contradictory or paradoxical. However, it is essential to understand it to know how to deal with it. As I noted in Part 1, in many regions, society can be conceived of as organized into “social pyramids” that stretch from a very wealthy family at the top to street sweepers at the bottom, with reciprocal obligations up and down the social pyramid. As I also noted—via an excursion through the arguments of Bernard Lewis—corruption is widespread in the West, it just generally flows in the opposite direction: using money to get political power, rather than using political power to get money.
It is impossible to understand why these structures are—or seem to be—different in the West than in the rest of the world without understanding the backstory, which starts with the birth of the modern era. Drawing on Enlightenment ideas of the 18th century, and building on even earlier, primarily British ideas about governance, the past 300 years have constituted a great social experiment to see whether society could be organized rationally, formally and institutionally, instead of along more hereditary, informal and relational lines. This was related to the advance of science and decline of religion: Given the revelations of science and empirical observation, an increasing number of people could no longer believe in an active god and a life after death. For example, science had started to reveal what the heavens really were: other suns and planets, not a supernatural realm.
If there was no paradisiacal afterlife credibly on offer, quite a few European thinkers and political figures became enamored of trying to construct paradise on earth. This social experiment produced the United States, the French Revolution (and an early example of the dystopias that result from such idealism, the French Terror), modern European states, communism, socialism, commercial capitalism, state capitalism, the industrial revolution and all that followed it (up to the computer revolution and the current AI revolution), consumer culture, and a number of other rationalist and “scientific” approaches to better organizing human society.
For this Enlightenment project, the primary motivator of human beings was conceived to be rational (here, read economic) self-interest—an idea that has held until very recently, and may just be beginning to come apart under the growing realization that idealistic attempts to produce perfected societies often result in hell on earth.
In order to secure a society based on Enlightenment values like equality, liberty, fairness and freedom, many new kinds of “rationalist” rules governing behavior would paradoxically have to be developed by the state, and human needs provided for or guaranteed by the state, rather than by the informal, kinship-based social structures that had existed since time immemorial.
Expanding population was also a factor. The argument was that you had to have more rational, directed, scientific management or you risked the kind of scenarios outlined by Thomas Malthus (1766-1834), in which population growth leads to poverty, famine, disease and war.
An alternative interpretation is now arising. Its adherents feel that they cannot trust governments to decide on their behalf, that they want to emphasize culture and family over traditional political organizations, and that they want to focus on smaller structures. They want radical action to stop climate change and environmental degradation, which governments—seen to be in thrall to moneyed interests—are believed to be unable to do. They are often strongly attracted to exclusive social groupings, often newly created but presented as ancient, defined by ideology, ethnicity or race. Equally confusingly, the extremes of what used to be left and right often meet in a kind of atavistic libertarianism.
To the extent that some of this is called “conservative,” it is not your father’s conservatism, and it is only really conservatism in that it harkens back to an earlier form of human social organization. It is to a certain extent related to the trends towards splintering so readily observable today in affairs from global to local, which can be understood as representing a rejection of the logic and rationality of economic structures and rationales (such as globalization) in favor of what economists sometimes call “animal spirits” alongside a desire for closely defined belonging and identity.
There are currently a number of variants of the reaction against the doctrine of progress and the presumed supremacy of rationality among human motivations. For example, in the UK, some proponents of Brexit said they would be happy to be measurably less wealthy if they could be measurably more British. A willingness to become less wealthy has not been seen in recent times as a politically conservative attitude. If these trends rejecting recent distinctions between legacy liberal and conservative orders continue to spread, what could this mean for existing political and business structures? That will be the subject of part three.