Chapter 18: Democracy & EcologyGreen Parties and the idea of laws; Rule of Law not Rule of Lawyers; Good, bad and commons laws; Legislating for social justice grey not green; Work and unemployment; Money and work; Seven ways to distribute money; GNP a perverse measure of progress; Growth needed to balance the books; Collapsing financial system in inverted state; Green problem reconciling sensible monetary policies with the green agenda.
The Green Party starts off with a headstart over the other two structuralist parties in the self-evidence of its basic premise. The precondition for living on this planet is to have a planet to live on.But that is the easy bit. From there it is necessary for them to put across the notion that we will not have this without some intervention from the political domain.
And then they have to persuade a sceptical electorate, in the face of much derision (and some sound argument) from all the other political parties, that not only is law-making the way to deal with ‘the environmental problem’...Parliaments, after all, are limited in their power to making this or that behaviour ‘against the law’...but that their party is the best one for the job. This takes some doing and requires a lot of research into just what is really going on in the world.
What’s more, there is strong undercurrent within any Green Party that is extremely suspicious of lawyers. The wiser ones understand how easily a rule of law can deteriorate into a rule of lawyers which is quite a different thing.
They notice that the political houses and the corporate headquarters that are causing all the trouble are crammed full of legal halfminds only too ready (for a price) to prove that five is four, that white is black and that what is legal is what is good.
Others understand little of such matters and being ignorant of their own ignorance, believing instead that the world is just their garden suburb writ large, confuse the idea of a society based on the rule of law with the quite different idea that in practice society has good laws, which are not needed because people would behave that way anyway; bad laws, which are the direct result of faction, party and interest; and just occasionally, ‘commons law’ which work in everybody’s best interest if everybody takes heed of them. The only discriminator people have to sort out the one from the other is their conscience.
Bad laws are unjust and should always be disregarded. Convenience is the only guide to action. Power is the only currency. Sensible people avoid fines and keep out of prison.
Good laws are best enshrined in manners and codes of conduct and in small societies are guarded jealously enough by the rewards and approvals of the elders and the encouragement and respect of your peers. Mentions in dispatches and knighthoods from the king are worth a thousand laws.
Commons laws are best left to common folk who are endowed with the common sense needed to look out for their common interest. Their justice will be swift and their sanctions will be effective.
Green Parties should believe in natural law, put their faith in universal principles and be in the business of abolishing all laws and running all the lawyers out of town. The law is a crutch for the weak and a millstone for the strong. It breeds injustice and the injustice breeds violence.
The Just Society will remove all laws and organize itself into virtuous communities where the individual human attributes of morality, moderation and mitigation are brought to bear to check any tendencies for the power of wealth or violence or faction to destroy the social fabric.
Proportional Representation in a Parliament endowed with the function of passing laws and with a sorry record for annulment, repeal or curtailment is inherently suspect as a means to approach nearer to a natural order and champion the rights of life over the wrongs of man.
But the work of green scholars has unearthed other problems, as if the question of laws was not sufficient to split ‘the fundis’ from ‘the realos’. Take the problem of work and money that hide behind the mask of economic science surfacing in the political debate as unemployment and growth.
Traditionally work was vocation and toil and most people had a share of each, from the king inside his castle to the poor man at his gate. This work gave life its meaning. ‘Work,’ wrote Thomas Carlyle ‘is life!’ Now there is nothing but mundane tasks, meaningless jobs and joyless ‘busyness’. And where there is work there is play. Nowadays there is only leisure.
How can unemployment be reconciled with thinking such as this? Is it freedom from toil? Then probably this is a good thing. Let us then deploy the robot. Or is it no work for young men? Then probably this is a bad thing. But let us not seek to replace it with the very thing, the prison masquerading as a school, that the young men knew as a very much worse thing.
And is there no work or is there instead no job? Are there really people without jobs and jobs without people as the megamachine’s propaganda would have us believe? Or are there people with time and energy seeking work with challenge and meaning? And what should money have to do with that?
Many wise men have concluded that money should have nothing to do with work. G.B.Shaw, for instance, in ‘The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism and Capitalism’ catalogued the seven ways in which money could be given out in a society. Let us list them.
to each what she produces
to each what she deserves
to each what she can get and hold
to the common people enough to keep them alive whilst they work all day and the rest to the gentry
the division of society into classes, the distribution being equal or thereabouts within each class but unequal as between the classes
go on the way things are
socialism and an equal share to everyoneAfter exposing the flaws in the first six proposals, GBS had few difficulties in convincing his readers that the last was the only sensible proposal and that ‘Socialism is Equal Money’. No mention there of any connection between work and money.
And remember one of the few stories Jesus is reported to have told took the same position. The man who turned up at the vineyard in the late afternoon got the same money as the man who had been there all day.
But what then of our Gross National Product? Green scholars have asked this question too, but soon found that there is a prior question as to just what it is anyway. Why are we rich if GNP is big and poor when it is small? Why are we successful and making progress when GNP is growing but unsuccessful and falling back when it is decaying?
Progress means increasing some good things and decreasing the bad things and doing it at a sensible pace so as not to put too great a stress on things and disrupt too many things too much before we have a chance to figure out what is going o. How does GNP measure this? Well the sad truth is that it doesn’t. In a peculiarly perverse way, it adds together as if they were plusses all the plusses and all the minuses.
Cars are wrecked, bodies are smashed, new cars are bought to replace the smashed ones, hospitals work flat out to mend the human wreckage. The GNP just keeps on piling up. What sort of nonsense number is this? Unfortunately a very critical one…at least for the megamachine and its onwarding and upwarding.
With a basic theoretical error in the counting house and usury not accounted for, the whole financial pack of cards collapses without the numbers increasing exponentially. So what you might ask. Then let it and begin a new set of books. What is the problem?
When society is in the natural state there is no problem. But when all power flows from the financial mechanism and all goods and services are called into being by the pull of money and credit; when all money and credit is issued at interest as debt; and when debt has accumulated to such a degree that it pervades every facet of society, then to place a fire bomb under the counting house is to nuke society.
The Bolsheviks did it seventy years ago and nobody who lived through it would ever suggest doing it again.
The inverted order present a unique set of economic problems distinct from the economic problems and opportunities of the natural order. Negative interest rates could do the trick, unwinding after years of winding up. There is something to be said too for Keynes’ inflation of the currency. And Lincoln’s greenbacks might also have a part to play.
But until economic scholars face up to the problem and set about the task of draining debt out of our societies, letting it be and putting a match to the books is unlikely to present the Greens (or anybody else) with a sensible course of action. And this fact is no help to the Greens as they try to put together a manifesto and go to the people with sound economic policies.
So the Greens, just like the Communists and the Christian Democrats, find the logic of their premises compelling them to demand structural changes in the approach of governments to work and money, and to approach the electorate arguing that this can be done through the politics of parties and the parliamentary representation of voters preferences.
Perhaps. But history gives more credence to gun barrels and catastrophe as agents of renewal. All we have going for us is knowledge and the belief of the enlightenment philosophers in the possibilities of the mind to analyse facts and imagine the possible. Utopia or Oblivion.