Pragmatism in relation to trade requires politicians to turn blind eyes to torture and genocide, writes JOHN WATERS
IT WAS unfortunate that President Michael D Higgins’s first speech outside Ireland should follow so hard on the discharging of his presidential duty of entertaining the vice-president of the most genocidal tyranny that ever blighted the face of Planet Earth. Xi Jinping, expected to be appointed leader of China later this year, came here as the smiling, modern face of a regime that has obliterated more human beings than Hitler and Stalin put together.
Nor is this an entirely historical achievement, since the inhabitants of Chinese laogai (forced labour camps) are today estimated at between four and eight million; ie somewhere, in population terms, between one and two Irelands.
It would be nice to fantasise that, if we weren’t so broke, our leaders might have found a few words to speak of such realities in the intermissions between bursts of boot-licking. But I wouldn’t be sure. It was hard to detect much in the way even of discomfiture amid the obsequious coverage of last weekend’s visit and the fawning of our leaders as they told us repeatedly how big is China and how small Ireland.
It was unfortunate, too, that the location of the President’s speech should be the London School of Economics, which last year became embroiled in controversy when it emerged that it had accepted £1.5 million in donations from a “charitable foundation” associated with Saif Gadafy, son of the late Libyan dictator. The younger Gadafy was conferred with a PhD on the same day as the first £300,000 tranche of the money was handed over.
Such vignettes provide a measure of the risks of speaking about values in a world increasingly characterised by compromise and accommodation. Higgins invoked the great socialist founders of the LSE, including Irishman George Bernard Shaw, in a call for a more humanistic emphasis in economic thought. Returning to his core theme of last year’s presidential election, he spoke of the emergence, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, of a “utopian vision of the right”, whereby politics was forced to take second place to unregulated markets. He spoke almost apocalyptically about the effects of the monetisation of social capital in Europe, which he said has been living through a period of “extreme individualism”.
Undoubtedly the President is touching on an important theme here, but I wonder if his contributions are not themselves becoming a shade too ideological. He again hammered Friedrich Hayek and Karl Popper, whom he cites as the philosophical godfathers of recent drifts. But is it fair to lay all the blame at the doors of theorists who died before the boom of the 1990s got under way?
I suspect the President resents Popper for his critiques of Marxism, thus failing to acknowledge that Popper’s scientific method, if correctly adopted, might have helped to guard against what happened to the dismal science in practice. Some elements of the President’s speech smacked of a triumphalist socialism on the rebound.
Indeed, in his implication that an answer to present problems is to be found in a rejuvenation of socialist thinking, Higgins might persuasively be accused of nudging the constitutional limits of his office.
But he is right in observing that excessive belief in the rationality of markets is currently distorting our public thought processes in alarming ways.
Look at how our daily media conversation has been dominated, for nearly four years, by an economic prognosticating that has proved incapable of either predicting the future or putting it to rights. The rationality fallacy of economics, indeed, was central to why we failed to see the disaster coming.
Offering no calculus by which the limits of materialism might be anticipated, a conversation based on the presumption of economics as a rational “science” was always bound to mislead us. By definition, this model of economics sees no virtue in anything except expansion; whereas experience conveys that, because there is no arithmetic relationship between material growth and happiness, the pursuit of well-being in this direction eventually leads to disaster.
President Higgins spoke also about the tendency to see each other as “calculating rational choice maximisers” rather than citizens. He rightly warned that the ideology of markets is supplanting the functions of elected governments, with markets regarded as rational and citizens not, nudging us closer to a totalitarianism of technocracy.
But the President’s official function, earlier in the day, in extending “100,000 welcomes” to the deputy leader of a morally bankrupt foreign power must surely have rendered him conscious of the ironies he was unleashing as he spoke.
In truth, government has become “monetised” to an extent that renders the citizen increasingly conscious of the discordance between word and deed forced upon our leaders by the imperatives of economic management.
Pragmatism in relation to trade requires politicians to turn blind eyes to torture and genocide, just as economic realities require universities to sell doctorates to the sons of tyrants. In truth, economics traps us all within mazes of contradictions, where at every turn self-interest seems to trump principle.
It makes you wonder if it is any longer possible for anyone, politician or otherwise, to offer a sincere assessment of the world and expect to be taken seriously.