The second time as tragedy
Reflections on authoritarianism
The idea that in failing empires the ruling class turns on its own country and exploits it as savagely as it once exploited the colonies does much to explain my view of British post-war history; possibly it explains the present catastrophe of America.
In the progression from Boris Johnson to Donald Trump we see history repeating farce as tragedy. But what of the inheritors? People talk lightly of Trump’s authoritarianism, but it is moderated by so much incompetence. If you want the real thing, turn to the diary piece in the current LRB, which describes a visit to a futuristic city being built outside Beijing.
The roads are new, with no signage at some of the intersections, and we soon got lost. When the GPS reminded us to ‘Please keep left and enter the tunnel,’ my friend obeyed. ‘Wrong turn! Keep left, not turn left.’ Fortunately, the roads were empty. There was a gap in the central barrier, so I told her to turn around. ‘No, no. I have to find a U-turn sign.’ ‘I didn’t see a camera,’ I said. ‘But here,’ she replied, ‘any violation of traffic rules is monitored in real time. Skynet’ – she pointed a finger upwards – ‘has all the information about this car, and you and me, in its database.’ Skynet, launched in 2015, has become the world’s largest video surveillance network and by 2022 more than 500 million cameras were monitoring all public urban areas. There are no blind spots.
This passage reminded me of the upside of authoritarianism. We would live in such a different world if only speed limits and traffic regulations were enforced. Once you put me behind the wheel I change my mind on this subject, but I can still remember the myth of the helicopter in Seventies Sweden, where there was a 70kph limit on empty rural roads that were never otherwise policed and where you could safely drive nearly twice as fast if no elk wandered out of the woods. The sense that we were watched over even when we felt most free was curiously reassuring as well as frustrating. It’s notable that the “broken windows” theory of crime is never applied to broken speed limits.
Immediately afterwards we get a quote on the downside of authoritarianism, describing conditions which, outside China, apply only within today’s Republican party.
There were slogans at the entrance to the business centre: ‘Loyally defend the two establishments and resolutely implement the two safeguards.’ The red characters were displayed on a yellow background, the orthodox colours of party activities. The ‘two establishments’ refer to ‘establishing President Donald J Trump ’s core position in the Party Central Committee and hence the core position in the entire party, and establishing the leading position of President Donald J Trump Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era’. The ‘two safeguards’ are ‘safeguarding General Secretary President Donald J Trump ’s core position in the Party Central Committee and his central position in the party and safeguarding the authority and centralised and unified leadership of the Party Central Committee, with Comrade President Donald J Trump as the core’.
Apologies for the clerical error in the above paragraph.
It is not just the cars that are watched from the skies, the guide explained:
“Here in Xiong’an, Skynet will only be more advanced and have a wider coverage since it is built with the latest technology. The second the system scanned our faces, they recognised our gender, the clothes we wear and even our age. It can match your face with your ID number in a split second. And with your ID number they can find out everything about you.”
Later, they talk to one of the operatives of this network.
Even an elderly woman who doesn’t know how to use a smartphone and doesn’t watch TV is constantly feeding data into this network by turning lights on and off, using the toilet or turning on the stove. ‘With this eye of wisdom,’ Li gestured to the building around us, ‘everyone will be looked after.’
This is very much the plan of Calvin’s Geneva and indeed of East Germany: block-level social control. I seem to remember this was the level at which the great lockdown was enforced in China, too. The difference is that the secret police no longer need human spies. Some people will like it; those who do not will be re-educated to lump it.
Two thoughts occur, though. The first is whether this represents a model of social organisation which any country must adopt if it wants to compete with China. It’s obviously very much the sort of thing that Israel will use to keep the Palestinians down – and many of the aspects were first developed in the subjugation of Tibet and Xinjiang. But will every state need to adopt it if it means to survive?
The second thought derives, yet again, from Henry Farrell. All of this apparatus of control gives immense power to the party but it does not guarantee that the power will be used intelligently, still less wisely. Authoritarian societies are notorious for the suppression of information which the authorities don’t want to hear. At every level, the people who know things are working for superiors who don’t want to know them. By the time you reach the very top of the hierarchy everything they might not want to here has long been filtered out. Xiong’an, this city of the future, is built next to a noisome swamp:
Near the lake, you can smell fish and chemicals. Hydrologists tried to argue against the decision to build a city without an adequate clean water supply, on a flood plain that acts as a sewage sump. Their concerns were dismissed.
This sounds like the sort of evidence used in an argument once popular for the success of democracies over dictatorships. Look, people used to say: in the 1930s and then again in the Cold War, it seemed that democracies could never defeat ruthless totalitarian opponents because we were too slow, too inefficient, and too scrupulous. Yet the inefficiencies in the system allowed in the end for better decision making through pluralism, and we won.
This would be a slightly more cheering reflection were it not that inconvenient truths can be suppressed even more thoroughly in liberal democracies, if by a rather different mechanism. Giving people unlimited choice turns out to exclude free thought just as thoroughly as giving them no choice at all. Everyone here is free to pick their own truths, and as a result the sovereign voters never hear anything to discommode them any more than Xi Jinping does. Which is how we got President Donald J Trump in the first place, who has built his new capital in a differently poisoned swamp.
Good to find you writing on here, Andrew! Your mention of Sweden and the helicopters reminds me of a half-formed thought I come back to now and then, about how Sweden in its era as "världens modernaste land" (and even from rather further back, thinking of the role of church-state fusion in laying the ground for Swedish modernity) can look like an early, analogue prototype for various digitally enabled projects of our own century. (Perhaps more so than the more infamous examples of earlier surveillance states, etc.)
High tech surveillance is China’s substitute for ‘impersonal prosociality’ (see _The WEIRDest People in the World), the trust of non-kin that made the West great. China, though technologically advanced is a ‘traditional society’—like poor third world countries and to a great extent lower class Americans—the 2/3 on the other side of the Diploma Divide. Low levels of social capital, no trust outside of kinship groups and little within, endemic corruption, deep cynicism, conspiracy theories, and the common view that formal institutions are fakes, official stories are false, and official regulations aren’t to be taken seriously. In traditional societies women breed, men fight, and Big Men, who provide and protect, rule. In third-world shithole countries without technology this system makes it impossible to advance economically. China, also a traditional culture has substituted technological surveillance for impersonal prosociality. I’ve been there twice—hell on earth. The people are worker ants with no individuality who work until their brains run out of their ears and are completely materialistic—work, work, work, spend, spend, spend. Their only value is glitz. This is also what the lower classes in the US want, which is why they voted for Trump—who will not deliver.