Devolution

by Clyde Wilson

This is the preface to Mike Tuggle's Confederates in the Boardroom.


Equipped with an abundant knowledge of history, Michael Tuggle has cast a discerning eye on the trends of the present. Not the ‘trendy’ trends but the real ones, those which can guide our steps into the future (as far as the future can be known to us mortals). The trends suggest to him something very hopeful – the probability and suitability of a change in the principle by which human affairs are governed. We have been living for a long time by the organising principle of command from the top down – something the American Founding Fathers decried as ‘consolidation’– and the opposite of liberty.

Throughout most of the course of Western Civilisation, until a little over two centuries ago, centralised government was regarded as something bad and alien, characteristic of ‘Oriental despotism.’ The Greeks, for example, were divided into self-governing city-states. They were never united under one authority during the time when their excellence in knowledge, art, and government reached levels that still astonish the world. Herodotus, the first historian, ascribed the Greeks' defeat of the Persian Empire to the resilience flowing from their freedom from arbitrary control. In typical fashion, government-worshipping historians of the nineteenth century forward preached the contrary: that the decline of the ancient Greeks resulted from their lack of unity.

However, a more reasonable interpretation is that, although they were damaged by fighting among themselves, the Greeks met with irredeemable disaster only after Athens had centralised a dangerous power to dictate to the other city-states. Thus, the Greeks' liberties and creativity ended precisely when they were united under the Macedonian monarchy.

John C. Calhoun, one of the great anti-consolidationist thinkers of the nineteenth century, pointed out that the Romans achieved their greatest freedom and strength as a people when there existed two centres of power – the Senate and the Tribunes – each with an absolute veto over the other's actions. The workings of the state required co-ordination and agreement among the elements of society rather than dictation from above. Contrary to government-worshippers who complained that the lack of a commanding central authority made society helpless, Calhoun observed that an independent consensus of the parts led to actions that were highly effective and more satisfactory to the whole. No central authority could match the strength of free men who co-operated willingly. Mr. Tuggle enlightens us as to the current appropriateness of Calhoun's insight.

Even under the Roman Empire (while it was healthy), although policies were sent out from the centre, vast areas of initiative remained in the provinces and cities – in military affairs, taxation, local government, and religion.

The Middle Ages were par excellence the age of decentralisation; there was scarcely any real power that was not local. Kings and lesser lords essentially depended upon the voluntary co-operation of their vassals. The Church, at least in appearance, was centralised in its own affairs, but it preached the rightness of subsidiarity in government. Our modern thinkers who extol the necessity and glory of the nation-state consolidated under one supreme authority tell us that decentralisation was the cause of the ‘darkness’ of those times. Looked at another way, perhaps it was the creative force of many different points of light that illuminated the way of the West out of the darkness – a darkness brought on by the inevitable collapse of the muscle-bound inflexibility of the imperial government. Certainly, the lights came on earliest in the free and self-governing cities, while the Renaissance blazed most brightly in the free and independent cities of northern Italy – not in some centrally-managed society.

In the seventeenth century it was thought that the ‘Sun King’ of France, Louis XIV, had brought centralised government to the height of its possibilities. Louis could oppress individuals; however, he could not – except through the traditional hodgepodge of taxes – oppress entire classes. He could declare wars, but he could no more command all the manpower and resources of the kingdom for his wars than he could the rotation of the planets. It was his nationalist successors of the Revolution and the Empire who marshalled the ability of a centralised government to command a whole society. Their handiwork was copied all over the Western world. The consolidated nation-state became the material and psychological focus of entire peoples while the ensuing conflicts among such states became the prevailing pattern of history. The American Revolution – and the Articles of Confederation and Constitution which followed – preceded the triumph of the nation-state. During the long colonial period, Americans enjoyed the benign neglect of the British Crown. The thirteen colonies barely felt the hand of central government (their citizens scarcely feeling the controlling hand of any government). It was the British governments attempt to end this happy condition that brought them to declare that the thirteen ‘are and ought to be free and independent states.’

The American Founders intended to create a Union which would institutionalise bonds of co-operation among those states and among the new commonwealths that their descendants would create out of wilderness in the future. They did not intend to establish a central authority, such as the one they had just thrown off, from which there was no escape or appeal except by the sword. They dreaded the spectre of ‘consolidation’ which, if allowed, would bring an end to their individual freedom and the self-government of their natural communities. Human associations in community were distinct from and took precedence over governments. Good governments were the servants of society, not its master.

The forces that reshaped the States United into the United State in the middle of the nineteenth century did so only as the result of the destruction of the essential elements of self-government and a holocaust of American lives.

The supposed deep thinkers of the nineteenth century (especially in Germany and the United States) celebrated the brutality employed against their fellow countrymen that was necessary in order to establish the nation-states they desired. Each sang the praises of his own country's new ability to mobilise the property and allegiances of the masses to the ends of the central state. Nationalist mania stipulated that the centralised state was a prerequisite for the liberation and progress of humanity.

Lord Acton, an immensely learned historian of liberty, was, like Calhoun, a nay-sayer of the nineteenth century, bringing into common reference the phrase ‘Power corrupts.’ The progress of man depended upon ordered liberty; and liberty depended upon the restraint and dispersal of power. Acton demonstrated that freedom in the Western world was a product of restrictions on power that had been painfully accumulated bit by bit over the course of centuries. Taking the long view, Acton wrote, the crushing of the principle of states' rights in the American war of 1861–1865 was not a victory for liberty, but a defeat.

One wonders why in the twenty-first century anyone should continue to give devotion to the principle of consolidation. The postulate of the all-commanding central government has resulted, for the first time in mankind's long and painful existence, in what were literally World Wars. The central state has given rulers the power to murder the innocents of their own and other countries by the millions. Even at its least destructive, the central state inevitably, as Calhoun also observed, preys upon the people, or a part of them, for the benefit of those who hold power and their clients.

Surely the premier empirical truth that emerged from human affairs in the twentieth century is that free markets are better than central planning. At least better for society as a whole, aside from those who profit from the Plan. As Tuggle makes clear, confidence in the necessity of centralised power in industrial management, education, and the organisation of many other human affairs has proved to be a delusion over the past two centuries. The wisdom of experience and of insight into the real trends of the present which the author has brought to bear tells us that centralisation has not fulfilled the promises of its apologists. Command from the top down has proven itself to be not only arbitrary and inimical to freedom, but also inefficient and unable to adapt to changing circumstances.

The wave of the future, the cutting edge, the hope of efficiency, abundance, and freedom for societies is just what the Western tradition has always told us – devolution of power to competing and co-operating authorities. There is no lesson that it is more important to take to heart at this moment in time. It seems that John C. Calhoun was right after all.

October 24, 2003

Dr. Wilson is professor of history at the University of South Carolina and editor of The Papers of John C. Calhoun.

Copyright © 2003 LewRockwell.com

Mainstream Media vs. Upstream Media

by Gary North

Recently, I was flipping through the local TV channels. I get four stations clearly, but none is worth watching more than once a week. I stopped briefly at an interview. Talking head #1 was a nationally known TV news teleprompter reader, also known as an anchorman. The other one was unfamiliar to me. He was a print media journalist – a reporter. The anchorman began his questioning of the journalist with this observation. "We’re both representatives of the MSM: mainstream media."

It hit me. The MSM is at long last visibly on the defensive. The moment you acknowledge that you are part of the mainstream media, you are necessarily also acknowledging the existence of another media, which I like to call the Upstream Media. It swims against the mainstream, which is flowing downstream. It’s easy to flow downstream. You just let nature take its course.

The trouble with downstream rafting is that eventually you either hit the rapids or go over the falls. In any movie about going over the falls, someone in the raft asks:

"What’s that noise?"

The optimists say that the river will carry them to the ocean. Fine. But if you don’t climb off the raft, you will drift out to sea and disappear. The point is, at some point you had better get off the raft. The mainstream will eventually kill you.

Today, because of the Internet, hundreds of millions of people are getting off the raft, all over the world. They grab a motorboat and head back upstream.

There are lots of tributaries heading back upstream. No single tributary that is feeding into the river is getting all of the traffic. But hundreds of millions of people are now headed in the opposite direction, at least with respect to some important issues. Other issues will follow. Issue by issue, readers are concluding, "We’ve been lied to." They are correct.

The Establishment at some point will face the implications of widespread disbelief in everything it says. At some point, people will not voluntarily do what they are told when they perceive their leaders as liars. When that day comes, political consensus will disintegrate. So will the mainstream Establishment’s control systems.

Upstream media were not readily accessible to most people as recently as a decade ago. The cost of locating alternative news sources was too high. The economists' rule held firm: "When price rises, less of the item is demanded." Now the same rule is being applied against the mainstream: "When price falls, more of the item will be demanded." The Internet has changed the relative pricing of media. This is a revolutionary turn of events.

The price of obtaining alternative views is falling fast. In fact, the main expense today is the value of our time. We have less and less time for the boring, superficial, and lying mainstream media. They know it. There is nothing they can do about it.

The monopoly that they have enjoyed for about 5,000 years is coming to an end. So is the free ride of political parties that rely on the mainstream media to keep the masses in line.

NEWSPAPERS ARE DYING

How much time do you spend each day reading newspapers? An hour? Probably not.

How much time do you read on-line? More than you spend with a newspaper.

Day by day, there are more people just like you.

A decade ago, I subscribed to three daily newspapers and about two dozen magazines. I also subscribed to a dozen investment newsletters. Since 2000, I have subscribed only to half a dozen paper-based newsletters. More and more newsletters are digital.

Instead of reading newspapers, I visit Websites. We all do. We are in news-overload mode. This is getting worse. Even with Google and similar search tools, we have too much on our plates. The allocation of our reading time has replaced the allocation of our subscription money as our most pressing reading problem.

Year after year, the network news departments of the three main TV networks are watching the Nielsen numbers fall. The same thing is happening to newspapers. They are declining in circulation. This is especially true of local newspapers. Readers are interested in national news, and they go to the Web for it.

This is creating a major problem for certain retail industries, most notably automobiles and furniture. Newspapers rely heavily on pages of full-page ads for local cars and furniture. As newspaper readers switch to on-line versions of local newspapers, as they are doing by the millions, the full-page ad’s pull per dollar is fading. There are little ads on-screen, which we have learned to ignore. There are even PRINT THIS buttons that strip out most of the ads. When I post a link to an article, I always link to the print-screen version.

Local car companies and furniture stores ought to have on-line sites that are kept up to date hourly. A car is sold. Its photo should immediately be taken off the Website. But retailers in these industries have not yet made the transition to the Web. They do not understand it. Web marketing is still in its shake-out period. Yet the Web is replacing newspapers today. The Web shake-out will not be over before hundreds of paper-based newspapers die. Subscriptions since 1990 have been steadily falling at 1% per year. This has now risen to over 5% in some cases.

Beginning in the late nineteenth century, large-circulation urban newspapers shaped local public opinion in America. There were many papers, morning and evening, and each one represented one of the two major political parties. Then came radio and television, both regulated by the Federal Communications Commission, which controlled frequencies and station broadcasting power. Now the Web and for-pay satellite TV and radio have unplugged power from the FCC. The FCC legally regulates the content of only the no-pay airwaves. It does not regulate the Web at all.

Politicians in the two parties have built their power base on the basis of controlling local media. Today, local media are dying: newspapers and local TV stations. Broadcasting is dying; narrowcasting is replacing it. This will force a re-structuring of American politics.

LOCALISM IS DYING

Two competing social forces are now moving in opposite directions. Retail outlets along the main drag in every city are going national: Wal-Mart, Home Depot, Office Depot, etc. Locally owned retailers of physical stuff are disappearing. Price competition is killing them.

At the same time, information is decentralizing. Choices are decentralizing. These are aspects of the same trend: anti-localism. The decentralization of information is virtual, not geographical. It is the radical decentralization of the Drudge Report: straight into a guy’s apartment in Hollywood. It bypasses regions, states, and townships. His apartment could be located anywhere. When information can come from anywhere and be delivered to anywhere at the same monetary price – zero – geography ceases to matter. We live in an information-centered age. So, we no longer live in a geography-centered age. This has never happened before. We are entering uncharted social waters.

"What’s that noise?"

Localism is fading: local loyalties, local politics, local schools. Higher levels of government absorb our tax money. Textbooks are produced nationally. Local school boards are impotent. Local politics gets the leftovers.

When I want to buy a new product, I go onto the Web and read reviews. Then I use the Web to find the cheapest seller. For electronics, the seller is usually located in the northeast, probably in New York City, and is not open on Saturdays. (The seller is not a Seventh-Day Adventist.) What do I care? To save 20%, I’ll buy on Thursday. Besides, I can order on-line 24x7. The phrase "24x7" is a sign of the times. Locally owned stores are not open 24x7. Web-based digital shopping carts are.

Regionalism is also fading. People are mobile. They move every five years. They do not establish local loyalties, which are costly to break. The ties that bind no longer bind very efficiently – in housing, occupations, regions, or marriage.

Regional mobility has been going on in the United States ever since the earliest days. Free land meant the move west. The kids got in a wagon and moved away . . . forever. Opportunity in America has always trumped regional loyalty in the long run. Regional loyalties have faded with every reduction in transportation costs. U-Haul and Ryder have done their work well.

The South will not rise again. Similarly, the yankees of New England have not visibly run the country since Jack Kennedy died. They do it indirectly. After Lyndon Johnson, the Texas presidents have been ersatz: both Bushes are of Connecticut stock, by way of Yale University and Brown Brothers, Harriman, the investment banking firm. George W. Bush bought his Crawford, Texas ranch in 1999 in preparation for the 2000 Presidential campaign. I call it "Potemkin Ranch." Here is a man who could afford to buy 2.5 square miles of land 25 miles from Waco – not exactly prairie dog country. The mainstream media never bothered to point out these incongruities. That is why they are mainstream.

When I say that the South will not rise again, I don’t mean the old commitment of the South: resistance to centralized government. That idea is spreading as never before by means of the Web. It just isn’t associated with a region any longer.

This is not just an American phenomenon. It is becoming universal. The gatekeepers of every national government are on the defensive. The gates cannot easily keep out electronic digits. The gatekeepers have lost power ever since the invention of the printing press. They could exercise some control over printing presses, ink, and paper. They cannot control electronic digits.

Our political world will change, even as our retailing world has changed. When it becomes obvious to voters that Washington, without robbing us blind, can no longer supply the stolen money with which it has bribed us for 90 years, mainstream politics will suffer a blow comparable to what the mainstream media are suffering.

NEWSLETTERS ARE MORPHING INTO WEBSITES

I mentioned that by 2000, I had cancelled all paper-based communications except for newsletters. They, too, are changing. They are dying off along with their editors.

My favorite newsletter, Otto Scott’s Compass, ceased publication in January, 2005. Mr. Scott, now in his mid-eighties, could no longer write it. His daughters placed him in a rest home. My second favorite newsletter, Hilaire du Barrier’s report on European affairs, ceased publication a year ago when the editor, age 94, died. Neither man was famous. Both were lifelong journalists. Hilaire du Barrier was not a well-known journalist. Yet I honestly believe that any historian who tries to write about European affairs, 1945 to 2004, who does not have a set of Hilaire’s newsletters will not get the story right.

Hilaire was an upstream media man. He had been captured by the Japanese in 1941 in French Indo-China. He had been tortured for two weeks. He did not reveal anything about the network of French spies he knew about. After the war, they reciprocated. He had a network of informants like no other journalist I ever met. Yet he was always in the upstream. Almost no one knew about him.

A couple of years before he died, I persuaded a friend of his to put all of his reports on a CD-ROM. At some point, this CD-ROM will go on-line. Of this, I am sure. Then his life’s work will get the readers it always deserved. The story of the insider’s creation of the New Europe will then get the distribution it deserves.

The gatekeepers have a problem. The insiders have a problem. The story is getting out. As it gets out, political loyalties fade. The European Union was sold to the voters by Jean Monnet and his successors on the basis of greater economic opportunity, not the benefits of a new political loyalty. There is still little political grass-roots loyalty to the European Union. France will probably vote against the new 230-page EU constitution. Anyway, I hope so.

Websites are replacing paper-based newsletters. The flow of non-approved information is becoming a torrent. This undermines consensus. This process includes political consensus.

Think of what home schooling means for the intellectual consensus. Think of the threat to the Powers That Be. The cost of textbook production has kept upstream interpretations away from most students. But now home school curriculum developers can get new views to millions of students by way of CD-ROM and the Internet. Parents who are sufficiently upstream to have pulled their children out of America’s only established church – the public school system – are ready to consider new interpretations. This is driving the academic gatekeepers crazy. Their monopoly over the media is fading. Now their near-monopoly over tax-funded education is slipping.

CAMPUS FOLLIES

Today, American higher education absorbs something in the range of a third of a trillion dollars a year, and this is rising by about 7% a year – the sign of government-enforced monopoly. The government-supervised college accrediting system keeps out price competition. It also keeps upstream opinions out of most colleges. But this monopoly is producing the familiar result: falling standards and falling output.

The young wife of a college professor (engineering) I know told me that at the college, where she is finishing her bachelor’s degree in June, several of her professors in the social sciences will not accept as valid any citation from a Web site that does not end in .gov. These people are crazy leftists. I mean really crazy – over the top Democrats and statists who honestly believe that their students are being corrupted by non-.gov political Websites. They are trying to keep students away from non-government-approved digits. They really are crazy. They have lost touch with reality. They are tax-subsidized nut cases.

In January, I visited an old friend who teaches history at an obscure state university. He and I were teaching assistants in the Western civilization program at the University of California, Riverside, in the late 1960s. That was back when all college grads had to take a class in Western civilization: dreary, long-dead days indeed.

For 35 years, I have recalled that when he could not decide what grade to give a student exam, he would have me read it. This was always an A/B decision. Invariably, I could not help him. I always graded it the same way: right on the dividing line. Yet he was a New Deal Democrat, and I thought Reagan was a sell-out. (I voted for William Penn Patrick in the 1966 Republican gubernatorial primary.) We had the same sense of what constituted student competence. That world of semi-objective standards is gone – buried in waves of political correctness.

He told me that his students today are extremely well-versed in digital research. They have grown up with the Internet. But, he said, there are two major problems: (1) they cannot evaluate the truth of what they read; (2) they are prone to submitting term papers that they have bought on-line.

So, we are seeing the result the triumph of official relativism in academia: "There is no objective truth." The students have bought the academic party line. They respond accordingly: (1) "One opinion is as good as another." (2) "A purchased term paper may be worth the money and risk." The Web is filled with conflicting opinions and cheap term papers.

Problem: in engineering and architecture, this outlook can lead to collapsing structures.

THE POOL OF TALENT

Year by year, a third of the labor pool emerges with a college degree. Most of these degrees are in the humanities and social sciences.

Meanwhile, China produces over 450,000 college graduates a year in science and engineering – as many scientists and engineers as the United States has, total. Then, next year, China will do it again.

There are teamwork issues here. There are also cultural mindsets. If I were an American manufacturer, I would rather employ a team of scientists and engineers that individually graduated from American colleges and whose members are entrepreneurial. Progress in commercial product development is not just a matter of individual competence in surviving formal education, based mainly on skill in mathematics. But as the comparative supply of such graduates shrinks in the United States, and as the American tradition of entrepreneurship invades Asia – as it is invading – there will come a time when wage competition from Asia will undermine the competitive advantage enjoyed today by teams of scientists in the United States. Even if companies develop products here, they will have them produced off shore. Only the most creative science grads will be amply rewarded here for product development. Civil engineers – road-builders – will have an advantage based on geography. Electrical engineers won’t.

Until the year 2001, Asia sent its best graduate students to study in the United States. The post 9/11 tightening of immigration standards (not on the border with Mexico, of course), coupled with the new prestige of Asian technical training, has reduced the percentage of foreign graduate students in American universities. This has never happened before in the post World War II era.

CONCLUSION

Mainstream media are losing to upstream media. This is eroding consensus among readers and TV viewers. Cable and satellite TV are undermining the networks. The Web is undermining the newspapers. Narrowcasting is undermining broadcasting. Home schools are undermining the tax-funded schools, though only at the fringes. Only the colleges seem immune, where government control is greatest. But they are becoming a laughingstock, even though parents still shell out far more than they need to (at least three times more) by sending their children off to college. Parents who know the system can get their kids through school for under $15,000 – maybe as little as $10,000 – which means that the kids can pay for their college educations by working part-time. The Establishment is on the defensive even in the halls of ivy.

This is becoming clear: price competition is now unstoppable. If you are not in a position to sell something cheaper, you are in big trouble. This fact is killing the mainstream media, which lost its ability to compete after 80 years of government regulation and protection. It is going to kill every other cozy little arrangement with the state.

Sell services, not stuff. Sell services locally, where Chinese college graduates cannot compete. Sell information, where Chinese college graduates cannot compete . . . and not many American college graduates can, either.

This is the era in which everything mainstream is hitting the rapids. The mainstreamers thought they were cruising up a lazy river. They weren’t.

"What’s that noise?"

May 25, 2005

Gary North

Copyright © 2005 LewRockwell.com