Can the centre hold? From Mandeville’s bees to artificial intelligence
Following his call here in TheArticle to engage the best philosophic minds in keeping the UK and Western nations away from disintegration, and in the absence of any practical and serious lead from political parties, Lord Howell suggests ways to check the gathering slide.
Not many people nowadays read Bernard de Mandeville’s allegorical Fable of the Bees, first published in 1705. This described to a shocked world at the time how a large and successful beehive colony stayed bound together and prospered, so long as the bees all pursued their own interests within the law and their relationships one to another, as both individual and essentially social creatures, even if untidily, and with some backsliders. Each creature, by going about its reciprocal business, contributed, even if unintentionally, to the cement of society.
But once they stopped working for themselves and their individual and mutual needs, focussing instead on higher and more perfect state design for general welfare and behaviour, their precious equilibrium was rapidly lost. The framework of society, which no one had planned but in which not only bees but humankind too had always existed, fell apart. Without that glue, a cohesive society, which all the millions of their individual actions had created, crumbled and their relatively stable and balanced society disintegrated into chaos, division, grievance and immiseration.
So things would also turn out, went Mandeville’s thinly disguised message, where in human affairs states spent too much time and effort trying to iron out social blemishes, intervening to insist on virtuous conformity to blueprints of perfection and putting the interests of an increasingly separate and distanced state ahead of people’s daily lives and needs. It would all end badly, if ever it ended at all.
What has that got to do with today’s planet in its current disturbed state? Or with current democracies – a dwindling number, we are told – or with present uncertainties on all sides? Suddenly, rather a lot.
Having spent 80 years since the second of two appalling world wars seeking to build “never again” global unity, anchored in the rule of law, the mood seems to be moving back towards chaos and disequilibrium. The challenge is not so much how to make progress, as how to prevent further alienation and division. A finger-in-the-dyke mentality is creeping into the debate.
The high hopes, particularly at the end of the last century, after the collapse of the unworkable and disruptive Soviet Union, have given way to tensions and anxieties in this one. The emphasis is now switching from building progress to halting regress, from new and kinder standards to seeing old and hideous barbarities revived, from compromise and dialogue to unvarnished abuse and empty middle ground, and from wider unity to narrow identity and separatism.
Books and journals now pour out with words like “breakdown” and “distrust” peppering their front pages. Experienced servants of the state talk of the international rule of law “collapsing before our eyes”. The Washington Post says the world order is “fracturing”. The Economist, that slim weekly volume of balance and common sense, says declinism is back in fashion, as empires — yet again — look likely to fall.
A recent Open Society Foundation global survey concludes that 42 percent of 18-35 year-olds would prefer military rule to sort things out, and 35 percent would like a leader “who does not bother with parliaments and elections”. PEW surveys pick up the same story in America. Of course, polls are polls and people may exaggerate or misunderstand in their answers to pollsters. But the tone of global discourse has changed distinctly.
We know of course why, or at least what kicked off the present phase. Russia’s bully-boy assault on Ukraine has set the recent world tone, but aggression and disgruntlement were always there. Fury and a sullen sense of somehow being cheated were always there, but the microchip has turned super-amplifier of every grievance and every minority. The channels of connectivity, which we hoped would bring an age of understanding through constant and reflective dialogue, which would bind interests and peoples and generations across continental networks, are now clogged with fakery and dismissive abuse.
The hum of enterprise, of trade, of social exchange, is having to share the platforms with the din of distortion, of hate and of propaganda as never before. The tech giants may genuinely want to wipe poison from their platforms and stay in good stead with customers and regulators. But what they can do is very limited and constantly requires new measures to keep evil material from seeping back into their systems.
So when and where do these problems stop? Probably never entirely, but a sort of check on the slide to anarchy can begin with a realisation and admission so obvious, so central and so omnipresent that it stays unstated. The digital age, with its immediacy, its transparency, is almost costless ease, its formidable technology, with AI only the latest stage , has altered ALL relations, yes, ALL, from the grassiest of grass roots of daily communication, all between parents and children and schools, to all within communities, all between communities and institutions, between institutions and higher hierarchies and tiers of national authority, and so on up and across the great network of social relations in which human beings live, of which, indeed, they are part.
Above all, where the stakes are highest and the dangers greatest, the relationships between nations and groups of nations have left the old world of diplomacy behind, with its chessboard thrown over by the living web.
The intentional tomorrow so hoped for – of a world-wide social democratic future, and, within each society or nation, much closer links between caring government and contented governed, of wider mutual understanding at all levels of society — has been elbowed aside by other pressures. Instead, a completely unintentional future, not at all what was planned by ideologues or social engineers or by politicians, is rapidly emerging centre stage. Not what the bees, or the reforming ones amongst them, wanted or dreamt about or had the technology to deploy. But not what the would-be architects of ever bigger state interests and involvement planned either.
Immediacy and transparency are the leading destroyers of the old collectivist dream of good and compliant relations between public authority and private lives. Sheer overload, impossible complexity and widespread fakery, now dressed up in AI, adding to the confusion, distrust and bewilderment.
Immediacy of response, tit for tat, of course kills off all time for well-reasoned response, for perspicacity or reflection, for the maturing of any form of trust in any relationships, especially those between officialdom and people’s daily lives. Transparency, dressed up as the right to know everything, pushes on into intrusion, with the freezing of deliberation and the hiding of judgment. Massive overload turns every pronouncement into a chain of clichés and assertive abuse.
Allow all this to sour relationships, and loyalty and respect melt away. A business loses its staff, a cause loses its adherents, a politician loses his or her audience and supporters, an institution loses its anchors, an administration loses all good will.
Here in the UK, in this cosmos of scepticism, distrust and straight disbelief, one wonders whether the party political champions on either side, lining up for the next General Election battle, realise how ridiculous their frontal, untuned shouts of party denunciation and assault, and their promises again of a better tomorrow (no, this time, really) now sound.
For nervous, even frightened, populations, a completely different tone is necessary. A tone that is far removed from the “gotcha” point-scoring of the electoral past or the condescending tone of a state apparatus that thinks it is superior to the society from which its strength, indeed its existence, actually comes.
At the global level, to halt the international deterioration, to make the forces pulling nations together, or most of them, once again clearly stronger than the forces pulling them apart, the very technologies which have so disrupted everything can yet be cleverly turned round to create the new binding forces, the new “glue” of constant communication which has been melting away so fast.
Within each nation, again, the same powers pulling parts of society apart can become the threads which stitch it together again, although with the state playing a new and much humbler role of service and support than in the past. To misquote Tolstoy, each country, like each family, even the ones which seemed most united, has its own divisions to repair in its own ways and its own bridges to build or rebuild.
America, once glorious in its united dream of states from shore to shore, is now no country for young men — or women. It has a vast task of internal and constitutional renewal to bring it back to strength and wisdom.
The ties which once led towards European unity have gone and entirely new ones have to be devised, more suitable for the internet age. The amazing and enormous network of English language nations has to be pulled together after years of neglect. But the Commonwealth now emerges via digital communication as the one sort of loose, voluntary and broadly like-minded alliance with enough resilience and underlying soft power connections to stay in existence in the 21st century. And meanwhile a new kind of connected Africa has to be allowed its own place in its own sun.
Coming from the global to the national level, the societal divisions, like deep flesh wounds, must be held with plaster strips and stitched together, not salted with more tired ideology from a past age and a partisan spectrum of beliefs and aims that now barely connect with the real issues before us. The heart of the matter is not race or gender or class, but reaching with new determination towards a capitalist system that shares, that is democratic, that is fair and spreads dignity and security to millions of households and financial literacy to an entire population, starting in the schools. This was the old dream of the Conservatives. The digital revolution brings a dream of genuinely widened ownership and financial justice to the edge of reality.
When election language and colloquy begin to touch on these fundamental issues, released from their cages by the internet age; when the leadership discourse begins to set our own nation’s advance properly in the pageant of history and in the totally transformed world landscape; when the case for staying together or coming together at every level gains new articulation — then we might just be on the road to avoid the ill-advised and misguided bees’ fate.
What happened to them? In the Mandeville story they dwindle to impotence and purposeless penury, powerless to conserve or regain their lost contentment and buzzing in their few remaining numbers aimlessly around a rotting tree hollow.
We can surely do better than that.
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