This time it was not a coincidence. Nor was it a marketing device, or me playing with words to create an interest. It was not even an intuition. I am totally lacking of it. I am a simple hardworking scholar. I painstakingly read texts in their language and put them in their historical context. At the time I was working on texts written by philosophers of the Middle Ages and Renaissance. Donald Trump appeared to me to characterize well (in the sense of caricature) the logical end of course of a political ideology, which started its voyage with Thomas More’s Utopia.
I am a simple hardworking scholar. I painstakingly read texts in their language and put them in their historical context
Nothing new under the sun! All systems of ideas tend to fall into their own caricature. Donald Trump was certainly not the only one to qualify, but he was the most grotesque and consequently the candidate who will likely gather the neo American liberals who were already showing signs of anxiety, frightened to lose their grip.
Yet, the liberal idea, which gave birth to the modern state has such a beautiful mind work at birth! It came on earth as a Christmas story, in December 1516, printed by the Gutenberg presses, all new.
the liberal idea came on earth as a Christmas story, in December 1516, printed by the Gutenberg presses, all new
It was a time of expansion of population (in Europe and China , international roads (the silk road), discoveries on sea. It was a time of creation of “City-States[2]” whose trade role was progressively escaping from feudal control which[3],[4]”. “A new world was forming, a society was restructuring itself within the ambit of high finance, with profit as its primary goal[5] The overseas trading-posts gave an opening for the development of a new “world economy”, to use an expression of Fernand Braudel’s. It was the time when the printed word spread at a phenomenal rate. The new books related voyages or told of idyllic far-off islands.
Changes create chaos in the way we think the world, a difficult ordeal for human beings who do not like instability of believes. And five hundred years ago, a European philosopher started to dream of a restructured ideal land which does not exist, thus its name U-topia[6]
Let’s start with a possible explanation of what we call the modern world, the way it started: in a dream. Allow me to enchant the reader for a moment and open the two books Utopia is composed of by using the famous formula: once upon a time.
The First book is hardly read and yet it is precious:
Once upon a time, there was a very unhappy kingdom where everything had gone wrong, where the princes were wicked, corrupt, indebted, vain, lazy or stupid or all of the above ... One evening an important pontiff of the times gathered around his table a panel of expert. He made sure he fed them well so they would come and give their sought after advice. The subject of the day was the social problems that plagued the kingdom, namely increasing violence and crime. What they said was utterly banal, repeating that criminals were sinners, instruments of the devil, or other inanity, which was repeated everywhere. They just agreed on one solution: the King should build more jails and hang all the thieves although they all agreed one point : the more they hang them, the more numerous they were.
The second book begins on a raised curtain. Comes in an imposing man, with a white beard, a high forehead and a deep gaze. He is a navigator, an explorer just back from an island named Utopia where, he says, everything is so well organized and managed (his words) according to the principles of sane political economy that, it is (almost) a little paradise, laborious but happy. No necessity, he adds, to hang thieves and criminals for they were none. He describes the life on the island with details in front of a spellbound audience.
It is a kind of fairy tale. And it would be indeed one of these silly little utopias, which borrowed their names from the book and bloomed in the XXth centuries. But it was not that kind of utopias. It was the a well thought articulated blue print of the modern state. This book had been written by a future chancellor of England who knew what power means, a philosopher who had read about everything, a commercial lawyer who eagerly awaited the return of the explorers returning from foreign countries with tales about new worlds, a master rhetorician who could construct an argument as solidly as a cathedral, a man of faith who abhorred violence and injustice and finally by a courtier who knew that one does not give advice to his king, Henry VIII about the way to run a kingdom. The slightest misstep, and it was death. Why do you think that the first book of Utopia, which describes the bad management of a Kingdom makes it clear on every page that it is the Kingdom of France?
Thomas More was condemned to humour and, thanks God, he had a lot of sense of humour. His text reads light, funny. It is dotted with a dizzying number of puns (in Greek and Latin which makes it reading difficult for the non scholars). His hero sailor is named Hytholdée a makeshift word meaning in Greek the peddler of non sense. The reader is told not to take him seriously as his name keeps coming on every page.
Under the noses of the king and princes and to the amused delight of the burgeoning bourgeoisie, the book described a well-run place but which is NOT under the authority of God nor the King (who is anointed by God).
The King, Henry VIII, had a good laugh. His courtiers applauded. The religious scholars smiled and let’s bet that Thomas More and his co-producer, Erasmus shared more than one giggle though not for the same reason. But let’s not be fooled: the source of humour is an infinite sadness. The pair was desperately seeking a solution to the violence of their time. We must read the whole title of the book: Utopia or the treaty of the best form of government.
Once freed of its puns and other provocations, the second book is a framework of perfectly articulated propositions defining human beings as in relation with their usefulness to a common good itself defined by reason. It's revolutionary and solid sewn, close enough to the liberal utilitarianism of Bentham, with two variants.
First variance: Utopians must be productive but not engaged in the production of surplus and unnecessary goods and services. It does not mean they are stuck in traditions. When explorers moored on the island and brought to their attention new technologies they incorporate them if deemed useful. We are not in a growth model while not being in a pattern of fossilization in time. Later it would be called sustainable development.
Second variance, the most important one: In Utopia the individual is defined as selfish and calculating in search of maximum pleasure (first postulate) but also as an individual whose greatest pleasure is to please others. Selfishness is altruistic by selfishness (second postulate).
This is how was settled the westerner challenge if one gives up God : the compatibility between the selfish instincts of human animals and the common good.
During the five centuries that followed European political philosophers have masterminded their theories on the modern state by playing a kind of game of square pegs and round holes: individuals entitled to individuality and free will who freely accept a common good which is a limitation. They all tried to find the magic wand, which will do the trick. The wand was called transcendental reason, instrumental reason, Deterrence, march of history or some sort of universal human instinct specific to humans.
Since God was not involved any longer, they all wanted to based their theories on, solid grounds, irrefutable certainties on which we would built universal laws the absolute antidote to an arbitrary power that they all abhor. Indeed the deep distrust of Hobbes against the arbitrary is underlining the second amendment of the US Constitution. The separation of powers in most parliaments is modeled on Montesquieu. The Declaration of Rights of Man and the Citizen of 1789 is inspired by the Critique of practical reason of Kant. Behind the charters of the UN Rights and Freedoms reads his essay on Perpetual Peace.
For five centuries what we called the modern state worked like an enterprise and perfected its department of human resources using democracy as the best way to successfully ensure the delicate balance between individuals and common good. Democracy has proven over time to be the best way to free individuals enough so a society never falls (for too long) into the rigidity of authoritarian dogmas, which so easily turn to arbitrary power. The consensus has been that only democracy (which is a process and not an ideology) can learn from science knowledge, adapt with reason to new circumstances and evolve.
But at the beginning of the twentieth century, the fragile balance started to crumble. Individuality was given more space while common good was suspected to be a disguised instrument of power and repression. A French philosopher, Jean Paul Sartre became the voice of generations of thinkers by declaring the individual absolutely free and alone with no other guidance than this freedom. He knew he was walking on dangerous ground and wrote subsequently a little pamphlet explaining that existentialism was a humanism. But the only guidelines he gave not to fall into the dangerous path of following traditions and ideologies started a new trend: the use of insults as philosophical arguments. These individuals who were not accepting limitless freedom were either cowards (lâches) or scums (salauds) or both.
The delicate scaffolding started to wobble all the more quickly as the legal landmarks and political boundaries of the nation states had begun to disintegrate under the pressure of a mega trend: globalization. Power had started to shift again as it had started to shift in 1516 when a worried philosopher, ambassador and chancellor was thinking in the refuge of his home on the Thames. The common good created in the West is becoming unmanageable as it was in Western Europe in the early Renaissance, violently shaken by challenges strangely reminiscent of ours.
The French historian Michelet who liked grand formula had said: when the state fails, the witches appear. The image fits for in the United States a kind of witch appeared, pushing the idea of total freedom of the individual to the max, further than Sartre had dared. The goddess of the market[7], as she was called, introduced the idea of the total individual-God, the hero entrepreneur, creator of wealth and whose mission was to destroy a decadent manager of the common good: the State. Decadent because it became providence, supporting those she castigated as total parasites. Decadent because it was in debt and not growing wealth. Decadent because it destroyed the spirit of entrepreneur creators with taxes, regulations and red tape.
Her name was Ayn Rand. She was a philosopher in the tradition of positivism who chose the romantic narrative to present her heroes-entrepreneurs saviours of humanity. Her novels were second best seller after the Bible, a point she had in common with Thomas More. He was in his time was the second printed best seller after the Bible.
More important! She has another point in common with him. Both defined the individual as selfish and calculating in search of maximum pleasure.
The comparison stops there and suddenly. Ayn Rand not only rejects the second postulate of selfish-altruism that Thomas More has introduced, but she throws it in the trash, literally. Charity, kindness, sacrifice, help others, sociability are, for her, abominable weaknesses that prevent entrepreneurs to create freely. They must be free to anchor their visions into successful businesses that will create jobs and possibly prosperity, even if it is not the goal of the hero, superbly selfish. They create for themselves because they are gods.
Big businessmen loved the idea, starting with Ayn Rand most fervent disciple, Alan Greenspan, chairman of the influential Federal Reserve System. He wept when he followed her coffin covered with a huge wreath in the shape of S barred ($).
Strangely enough, many of those she named parasites wept a puzzling behaviour witnessed when tea partiers who were beneficiary of social security were embracing the neocons views. The reasons are complex though it may have to do simply with a common delusion. The welfare recipient carrying slogans never regarded himself as a parasite but as a possible free creator who had been prevented by an authoritarian state to express himself. On the other hands he screamed from the top of his lungs at the other recipients who were accused of being lazy parasites. Ayn Rand provided him with a rich vocabulary.
The anger was not only aimed at social security recipients. In her ever long novels in Ayn Rand invective all those who live from the state (politicians, public servants, teachers, social workers, etc). She calls them parasites, bums, insects among others insults. We did not find the word losers, a favourite of one of her fervent admirer, Donald Trump, but she would certainly have approved.
In the 80s, the economists of the School of Chicago eliminated her rather excessive language but stayed the course and received several Nobel Prize for their theories of public choice which enshrined the individuals’ selfishness. The virulent hatred of the State expressed by Rand became cold and rationalized through economic calculations. The common good became a promise reward for those who would obey the law of the markets. The government, regarded as a corrupted hindrance had no role any longer. Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform summarized the feeling when he said in a famous interview :I don't want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.
The businessman hero was awarded millions of dollars because he deserves it. He (they were a sprinkle of women) made the first pages of magazines for decades while back pages were devoted to the inefficiency and corruption of public figures and institutions. No image better embodies the ideology than Gordon Gekko, the hero of the movie Wall Street, played remarkably by Michael Douglas. He is an archetype hero according to Ayn Rand. Drunk with whiskey and with himself, he repeats the famous motto greed is good, a formula that redefines the common good provided that combines the future. Let’s Chris MacDonald, helps us to understand how important this film is.
In the original Wall Street, Michael Douglas’s character, Gordon Gekko, is a corporate raider — essentially, he buys up underperforming companies, breaks them up and sells their parts at a healthy profit. What drives him? Greed, pure and simple. In one scene, Gekko appears at the annual shareholders’ meeting being held by Teldar Paper. Gekko owns shares, but wants more. He wants control of the company, though his motives for doing so are hidden. It is there that he delivers the speech that includes the movie’s most famous line. “Greed,” he tells the shareholders of Teldar, “is good.”[8]
That line is the only thing a lot of people alive in the 80’s remember about Wall Street. And that’s a shame.
Here’s Gordon Gekko’s famous “Greed is good” speech, in its entirety[9]:
Teldar Paper, Mr. Cromwell, Teldar Paper has 33 different vice presidents each earning over 200 thousand dollars a year. Now, I have spent the last two months analyzing what all these guys do, and I still can’t figure it out. One thing I do know is that our paper company lost 110 million dollars last year, and I’ll bet that half of that was spent in all the paperwork going back and forth between all these vice presidents. The new law of evolution in corporate America seems to be survival of the unfittest. Well, in my book you either do it right or you get eliminated. In the last seven deals that I’ve been involved with, there were 2.5 million stockholders who have made a pretax profit of 12 billion dollars. Thank you. I am not a destroyer of companies. I am a liberator of them! The point is, ladies and gentleman, that greed, for lack of a better word, is good. Greed is right, greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Greed, in all of its forms; greed for life, for money, for love, knowledge has marked the upward surge of mankind. And greed, you mark my words, will not only save Teldar Paper, but that other malfunctioning corporation called the USA. Thank you very much.
The common good has not disappeared, but it has another name: economic growth measured with the laws, which are the laws of the market.
Reality became better than fiction. In 2012 The Economist gives his cover page to Mitt Romney, who like Gecko made his fortune by buying up underperforming companies, breaking them up and selling their parts at a healthy profit. He was then presidential candidate and was welcome with the headline: "America's next CEO." All is said. The common good has not disappeared, but it has another name: economic growth measured with the laws, which are the laws of the market. It has become an act of faith, a deep faith with its dogmas. Harvey Cox, Harvard Divinity professor, discovered that they were following the logic of Aquinas’s Summae Replace "God" with "Market" and everything becomes clear: the market is omnipresent, omnipotent, omniscient, and its laws are inscrutable. Individuals left free must confront their interests in a free market. The magic of the market will operate for the benefit of each and all.
Passionate faith becomes obtuse, impervious to arguments. There is always this moment when faith becomes bad faith, the most dangerous passage. It started with an ever smiling Ronald Reagan who asked not to be bothered with facts and statistics. Started a wave of dismissal of any scientific proof of limitations, for they are as inacceptable limitations of the will of the hero-entrepreneur than limitations by the government.
The wave has been going full throttle in the 2012 presidential campaign. Sarah Palin screamed Drill, drill baby in the face of environmentalists! Donald Trump kept the pace by his famous tweet : Any and all weather events are used by the GLOBAL WARMING HOAXSTERS to justify higher taxes to save our planet! They don't believe it $$$$![10]
The belief of the individual creator of wealth has been so well understood by multinational companies that they have asked to become legal persona, an environmental disaster in the making for it entitles them to any predation they feel entitled to. The only real, tangible, irrefutable common good of humanity, that is the planet does not exist legally for it has been regarded as limitless.
It started five centuries ago. Thomas More had thought about demographic limits of the land by declaring it…. limitless. When the island of Utopia is overcrowded, he writes, the Utopians take their boats and invade a less populated island. They do this as gently as possible by convincing the natives they are given an opportunity to manage better their resources. Later we will call this merger and acquisitions in the name of growth.
Our faith in economic growth is the utopian hope there will always be another island to exploit.
There are no more other islands. There will be soon nine billions people, individuals or regrouped in enterprises who are told by the most powerful global ideology humanity has ever created they can take a boat, go to another place and create another enterprise which will create wealth.
Since the seventies, these premises have been questioned. In Paris, in December of last year there have been talks to include rights of the common good to the legal international apparatus under the banner of the Enlightment.
At the very practical level, it does not address the issue of implementation. At a more abstract level, it does not address the speed of changes, which are now breaking all the boundaries in use in our legal system. Everything has become fluid: what is life, death, animal, robot, human being, matter, conscious? What is appropriation, propriety, who owns the soil, the genes, the DNA, the virus, the virtual communications. It does not address our thinking in a discursive way, which cut into the field of thought, the individual word that has gradually separated to the point of the absorbent core of our modes thought and legislate [11] It still addresses the issue of the Common Good as transcendent (a U-topia) while the common good is immanent. The Common Good is a Topia.
Philosophies of immanence are not new but not well know and regarded as irrelevant as far as political philosophy is concerned. Leibniz is an example. Chinese philosophers suffered the same fate and have been totally ignored by philosophy departments.
And yet Zhao Tingyang, to name one of these philosophers, came to speak at the UN to present a radically different way of thinking, a philosophy of immanence, an inclusive utopia Everything Under Sky.
Chinese philosophy is an ontology of relation, opposite the ontology of things, It makes the common interests of the whole (common good) a priority over individual interests
He describes Chinese philosophy as an ontology of relation, opposite the ontology of things. It makes the common interests of the whole (common good) a priority over individual interests, so that the benefits of joining the system will al-ways be greater than the benefits of leaving it; it creates a structure of harmony where individual interests are so interlocking and mutually constituted that anyone’s gain will always result in a gain for others, and anyone’s loss will always lead to a loss for others.
In other words it is rebalance the lost equilibrium between individual and common group under the concept of All-under-Heaven. In contrast to the western concept of empire, China has a three thousand year-old traditional concept. The term ‘All-under-Heaven’ (Tian-xia,), found in almost the oldest Chinese texts, means firstly the earth, or the whole world under heaven.
It is almost equivalent to ‘the universe’ or ‘the world’ in western languages. Its second meaning is the ‘hearts of all peoples’ , or the ‘general will of the people’. The world is always the home-for-people, that is, the earth as it is ours more than the earth as it is All-under-Heaven therefore consists of both the earth and the people. Enjoying All-under-Heaven does not mean to receive the lands from people who are forced to give, but to satisfy all people with a good way of governance. [12]
Zhao faults Western theories for contributing to this “failed world” with their emphasis on the nation-state, its separation between interests of individuals and that tianxia theory offers an alternative, far better model of a future world order that takes into account the interests of the entire world, whatever its constituent elements. Zhao insists on the importance of a world institution as the highest political entity or authority capable of caring for the entire world. This, in effect, amounts to saying a world government is necessary in the tianxia system.
According to his theory, internal order depends on external order; or to put it differently, a lower-level order such as the one between nation-states always depends on a higher-level world order of which nation-states are only constituent parts. He therefore argues that “internationality,” which is the concept upon which most Western theories of international relations are based, is unsuitable for thinking about world order. Instead, it must be replaced by the concept of what he calls “worldness,” whose scope is broader than and subsumes “national interests.”
We do not want to make it appears as simple as it looks when translated into our language. Our reflex will be to declare the proposal as another theory of a world government. Another one is to link it to Chinese propaganda. It is not He (Zhao) is perhaps the first modern Chinese scholar to have systematically theorized the tianxia, without committing the fallacies of radical Confucianism, which wants to take china back into the ancient society or those of New Confucianism, which claims that Chinese culture has every ingredient of modernity already, even liberal democracy. From Zhao’s works one can also glimpse the rising intellectual tide among Chinese scholars in rethinking china’s international role. Zhao’s project itself remains incomplete but it has at least succeeded in stirring up a Chinese imagining of the future world order. [13]
Let’s go even further and use the overused word of new paradigm. It is another way of thinking ingrained into the way cultures ideograms-based think with both sides of the brains. Interality is the key, a concept better suited to the fluidity of our world and the way we can frame it in a non discursive order which better suited to the digital age.[14]
This time if this looks complicated, it is, nearly out of grasp for discursive trained minds. Although the brain is plastic, one does not just decide to use both sides of ones brain. But somehow it will have to be done by the more flexible younger minds who are already using images-ideograms to communicate. By their very nature, ideographs are imagistic, suggestive, ambiguous, and polysemous. As far as meaning is concerned, all they have recourse to is the interality, or interplay, between their constituent elements. The ascendance of technical images at the expense of the phonetic alphabet feels like an ideographic turn, which is arguably a special instance of the interological turn.[15]
Can they do it? Will they have time? That I do not know. But if we do not do it and attempt a best form of global government rewriting all the charters, it will be easy for me (and others) to predict the ensuing chaos and dystopias as we regressed to the mammalian brain, the one studied by Laborit, who had to explain to us the obvious. A being’s only reason for being, he wrote, is being.[16]
Notes
[1] Options Politiques, Montréal Juillet-Août 1992
[2] See Fernand Braudel, Le Temps du Monde, Paris, Armand Colin 1979 (English version Civilisation and Capitalism, vol. 3 Perspectives of the World,trans. Siân Reynolds, New York, Harper Row 1982)
[3] The first commercial companies[3] came into existence, and so initiated a gradual evolution away from unquestioning acceptance of the divine law of a “debt” owed to one’s feudal master and towards a hope of profit – shared among partners – derived from trading in markets and from overseas expeditions. Such merchant trading thereby introduced a “neutral” and at once “egalitarian” element, which caused particular disturbance to the medieval order, be it of Church or State. By “neutral element”, must be understood an element which “had no place of belonging” which was “itinerant”, which was grounded in the abstract par excellence: the calculation of commercial opportunity which “perhaps even more than deductive reasoning is assuredly what dominated that extra-religious culture”
[6] The word comes from the Greek: οὐ ("not") and τόπος ("place") and means "no-place",
[7] Jennifer Burns. Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right Hardcover – Bargain Price, October 19, 2009 nbsp; Oxford University Press, USA (October 19, 2009)
[8] https://businessethicsblog.com/2010/10/12/wall-street-1987-greed-is-good/ Chris MacDonald, Ph.D., is an educator, speaker, and consultant in the realm of business ethics. He teaches at the Ted Rogers School of Management, at Ryerson University in Toronto, where he is Director of the Jim Pattison Ethical Leadership Education & Research Program, at the Ted Rogers Leadership Centre.
[9] https://businessethicsblog.com/2010/10/12/wall-street-1987-greed-is-good/ Chris MacDonald, Ph.D., is an educator, speaker, and consultant in the realm of business ethics. He teaches at the Ted Rogers School of Management, at Ryerson University in Toronto, where he is Director of the Jim Pattison Ethical Leadership Education & Research Program, at the Ted Rogers Leadership Centre.
[10] 1:40 PM - 26 Jan 2014
[11] Imagism as a poetic movement simply lays bare the paradigm shift; it is also a retrieval of the Chinese linguistic sensibility, which dates further back to a pre-linguistic period—that of the immemorial I Ching (Yi Jing 易經). If one knows how to do the conversion, an imagist poem is the equivalent of a Zen drawing, or even a single Chinese character—at least in theory. In the realm of filmmaking, the discovery of the Kuleshov Effect and montage was long foreshadowed by a basic linguistic fact: the interality, or interplay, between Chinese characters. In this sense, to say that reading a Chinese text feels like watching a motion picture is to commit anachronism—the order needs to be reversed. But the interological sentiment is right-minded regardless. For our purposes, to claim that the new digital code is ideographic in nature is to imply that the digital age is one that foregrounds interality.
Peter Zhang Grand Valley State University
[12] https://www.globalasia.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/420.pdf
[13] Feng Zhangan is an assistant professor in the Department of International Relations at the University of Beijing. 108
[14] Peter Zhang Grand Valley State University
[15] Ibid.
[16] Henri Laborit (born in Hanoi in 1914) was a French physician, writer and philosopher. He started his career as a neurosurgeon in the Marines and then moved on to fundamental research