The senility that afflicts ruling elites in their last years, the theme
of the previous post in this sequence, is far from the only factor leading the
rich and influential members of a failing civilization to their eventual
destiny as lamppost decorations or come close equivalent. Another factor, at
least as important, is a lethal mismatch between the realities of power in an
age of decline and the institutional frameworks inherited from a previous age
of ascent.
That sounds very abstract, and appropriately so. Power in a
mature civilization is very abstract, and the further you
ascend the social ladder, the more abstract it becomes. Conspiracy theorists of
a certain stripe have invested vast amounts of time and effort in quarrels over
which specific group of people it is that runs everything in today’s America.
All of it was wasted, because the nature of power in a mature civilization
precludes the emergence of any one center of power that dominates all others.
Look at the world through the eyes of an elite class and
it’s easy to see how this works. Members of an elite class compete against one
another to increase their own wealth and influence, and form alliances to pool
resources and counter the depredations of their rivals. The result, in every
human society complex enough to have an elite class in the first place, is an
elite composed of squabbling factions that jealously resist any attempt at
further centralization of power. In times of crisis, that resistance can be
overcome, but in less troubled times, any attempt by an individual or faction
to seize control of the whole system faces the united opposition of the rest of
the elite class.
One result of the constant defensive stance of elite
factions against each other is that as a society matures, power tends to pass
from individuals to institutions. Bureaucratic systems take over more and more
of the management of political, economic, and cultural affairs, and the
policies that guide the bureaucrats in their work slowly harden until they are
no more subject to change than the law of gravity. Among its other benefits to the existing
order of society, this habit—we may as well call it policy mummification—limits
the likelihood that an ambitious individual can parlay control over a single
bureaucracy into a weapon against his rivals.
Our civilization is no exception to any of this. In the modern industrial world, some
bureaucracies are overtly part of the political sphere; others—we call them
corporations—are supposedly apart from government, and still others like to
call themselves “non-governmental organizations” as a form of protective camouflage.
They are all part of the institutional structure of power, and thus function in
practice as arms of government. They
have more in common than this; most of them have the same hierarchical
structure and organizational culture; those that are large enough to matter
have executives who went to the same schools, share the same values, and crave
the same handouts from higher up the ladder. No matter how revolutionary their
rhetoric, for that matter, upsetting the system that provides them with their status
and its substantial benefits is the last thing any of them want to do.
All these arrangements make for a great deal of stability,
which the elite classes of mature civilizations generally crave. The downside
is that it’s not easy for a society that’s proceeded along this path to change
its ways to respond to new circumstances. Getting an entrenched bureaucracy to
set aside its mummified policies in the face of changing conditions is
generally so difficult that it’s often easier to leave the old system in place
while redirecting all its important functions to another, newly founded
bureaucracy oriented toward the new policies. If conditions change again, the
same procedure repeats, producing a layer cake of bureaucratic organizations
that all supposedly exist to do the same thing.
Consider, as one example out of many, the shifting of
responsibility for US foreign policy over the years. Officially, the State
Department has charge of foreign affairs; in practice, its key responsibilities
passed many decades ago to the staff of the National Security Council, and more
recently have shifted again to coteries of advisers assigned to the Office of
the President. In each case, what drove
the shift was the attachment of the older institution to a set of policies and
procedures that stopped being relevant to the world of foreign policy—in the
case of the State Department, the customary notions of old-fashioned diplomacy;
in the case of the National Security Council, the bipolar power politics of the
Cold War era—but could not be dislodged from the bureaucracy in question due to
the immense inertia of policy mummification in institutional frameworks.
The layered systems that result are not without their
practical advantages to the existing order. Many bureaucracies provide even
more stability than a single bureaucracy, since it’s often necessary for the
people who actually have day to day responsibility for this or that government
function to get formal approval from the top officials of the agency or
agencies that used to have that responsibility, Even when those officials no
longer have any formal way to block a policy they don’t like, the personal and
contextual nature of elite politics means that informal options usually exist.
Furthermore, since the titular headship of some formerly important body such as
the US State Department confers prestige but not power, it makes a good
consolation prize to be handed out to also-rans in major political contests, a
place to park well-connected incompetents, or what have you.
Those of my readers who recall the discussion of catabolic
collapse three weeks ago will already have figured out one of the problems with
the sort of system that results from the processes just sketched out: the maintenance bill for so baroque a form of
capital is not small. In a mature civilization, a large fraction of available
resources and economic production end up being consumed by institutions that no
longer have any real function beyond perpetuating their own existence and the
salaries and prestige of their upper-level functionaries. It’s not unusual for
the maintenance costs of unproductive capital of this kind to become so great a
burden on society that the burden in itself forces a crisis—that was one of the
major forces that brought the French Revolution, for instance. Still, I’d like
to focus for a moment on a different issue, which is the effect that the
institutionalization of power and the multiplication of bureaucracy has on the
elites who allegedly run the system from which they so richly benefit.
France in the years leading up to the Revolution makes a
superb example, one that John Kenneth Galbraith discussed with his trademark
sardonic humor in his useful book The Culture of
Contentment. The role of ruling elite in pre-1789 France was occupied
by close equivalents of the people who fill that same position in America
today: the “nobility of the sword,” the old feudal aristocracy, who had roughly
the same role as the holders of inherited wealth in today’s America, and the “nobility
of the robe,” who owed their position to education, political office, and a
talent for social climbing, and thus had roughly the same role as successful
Ivy League graduates do here and now. These two elite classes sparred
constantly against each other, and just as constantly competed against their
own peers for wealth, influence, and position.
One of the most notable features of both sides of the French
elite in those days was just how little either group actually had to do with
the day-to-day management of public affairs, or for that matter of their own
considerable wealth. The great aristocratic estates of the time were
bureaucratic societies in miniature, ruled by hierarchies of feudal servitors
and middle-class managers, while the hot new financial innovation of the time,
the stock market, allowed those who wanted their wealth in a less
tradition-infested form to neglect every part of business ownership but the
profits. Those members of the upper classes who held offices in government, the
church, and the other venues of power presided decorously over institutions
that were perfectly capable of functioning without them.
The elite classes of mature civilizations almost always seek
to establish arrangements of this sort, and understandably so. It’s easy to
recognize the attractiveness of a state of affairs in which the holders of
wealth and influence get all the advantages of their positions and have to put
up with as few as possible of the inconveniences thereof. That said, this
attraction is also a death wish, because it rarely takes the people who
actually do the work long to figure out that a ruling class in this situation
has become entirely parasitic, and that society would continue to function
perfectly well were something suitably terminal to happen to the titular
holders of power.
This is why most of the revolutions in modern history have
taken place in nations in which the ruling elite has followed its predilections
and handed over all its duties to subordinates. In the case of the American
revolution, the English nobility had been directly involved in colonial affairs
in the first century or so after Jamestown. Once it left the colonists to
manage their own affairs, the latter needed very little time to realize that
the only thing they had to lose by seeking independence was the steady
hemorrhage of wealth from the colonies to England. In the case of the French
and Russian revolutions, much the same thing happened without the benefit of an
ocean in the way: the middle classes who actually ran both societies recognized
that the monarchy and aristocracy had become disposable, and promptly disposed
of them once a crisis made it possible to do so.
The crisis just mentioned is a significant factor in the
process. Under normal conditions, a society with a purely decorative ruling
elite can keep on stumbling along indefinitely on sheer momentum. It usually
takes a crisis—Britain’s military response to colonial protests in 1775, the
effective bankruptcy of the French government in 1789, the total military
failure of the Russian government in 1917, or what have you—to convince the
people who actually handle the levers of power that their best interests no
longer lie with their erstwhile masters. Once the crisis hits, the unraveling
of the institutional structures of authority can happen with blinding speed,
and the former ruling elite is rarely in a position to do anything about it.
All they have ever had to do, and all they know how to do, is issue orders to
deferential subordinates. When there are none of these latter to be found, or
(as more often happens) when the people to whom the deferential subordinates
are supposed to pass the orders are no longer interested in listening, the
elite has no options left.
The key point to be grasped here is that power is always
contextual. A powerful person is a person able to exert particular kinds of
power, using particular means, on some particular group of other people, and
someone thus can be immensely powerful in one setting and completely powerless
in another. What renders the elite classes of a mature society vulnerable to a
total collapse of power is that they almost always lose track of this unwelcome
fact. Hereditary elites are particularly prone to fall into the trap of
thinking of their position in society as an accurate measure of their own
personal qualifications to rule, but it’s also quite common for those who are
brought into the elite from the classes immediately below to think of their
elevation as proof of their innate superiority. That kind of thinking is
natural for elites, but once they embrace it, they’re doomed.
It’s dangerous enough for elites to lose track of the
contextual and contingent nature of their power when the mechanisms through
which power is enforced can be expected to remain in place—as it was in the
American colonies in 1776, France in 1789, and Russia in 1917. It’s far more
dangerous if the mechanisms of power themselves are in flux. That can happen
for any number of reasons, but the one that’s of central importance to the
theme of this series of posts is the catabolic collapse of a declining
civilization, in which the existing mechanisms of power come apart because
their maintenance costs can no longer be met.
That poses at least two challenges to the ruling elite, one
obvious and the other less so. The obvious one is that any deterioration in the
mechanisms of power limits the ability of the elite to keep the remaining
mechanisms of power funded, since a great deal of power is always expended in
paying the maintenance costs of power. Thus in the declining years of Rome, for
example, the crucial problem the empire faced was precisely that the sprawling
system of imperial political and military administration cost more than the
imperial revenues could support, but the weakening of that system made it even
harder to collect the revenues on which the rest of the system depended, and
forced more of what money there was to go for crisis management. Year after
year, as a result, roads, fortresses, and the rest of the infrastructure of
Roman power sank under a burden of deferred maintenance and malign neglect, and
the consequences of each collapse became more and more severe because there was
less and less in the treasury to pay for rebuilding when the crisis was over.
That’s the obvious issue. More subtle is the change in the
nature of power that accompanies the decay in the mechanisms by which it’s
traditionally been used. Power in a mature civilization, as already noted, is
very abstract, and the people who are responsible for administering it at the
top of the social ladder rise to those positions precisely because of their
ability to manage abstract power through the complex machinery that a mature
civilization provides them. As the mechanisms collapse, though, power stops being
abstract in a hurry, and the skills that allow the manipulation of abstract
power have almost nothing in common with the skills that allow concrete power
to be wielded.
Late imperial Rome, again, is a fine example. There, as in
other mature civilizations, the ruling elite had a firm grip on the intricate
mechanisms of social control at their uppermost and least tangible end. The
inner circle of each imperial administration—which sometimes included the
emperor himself, and sometimes treated him as a sock puppet—could rely on
sprawling many-layered civil and military bureaucracies to put their orders
into effect. They were by and large subtle, ruthless, well-educated men,
schooled in the intricacies of imperial administration, oriented toward the big
picture, and completely dependent on the obedience of their underlings and the
survival of the Roman system itself.
The people who replaced them, once the empire actually fell,
shared none of these characteristics except the ruthlessness. The barbarian
warlords who carved up the corpse of Roman power had a completely different set
of skills and characteristics: raw physical courage, a high degree of
competence in the warrior’s trade, and the kind of charisma that attracts
cooperation and obedience from those who have many other options. Their power
was concrete, personal, and astonishingly independent of institutional forms.
That’s why Odoacer, whose remarkable career was mentioned in an
earlier post in this sequence, could turn up alone in a border
province, patch together an army out of a random mix of barbarian warriors, and
promptly lead them to the conquest of Italy.
There were a very few members of the late Roman elite who
could exercise power in the same way as Odoacer and his equivalents, and
they’re the exceptions that prove the rule. The greatest of them, Flavius
Aetius, spent many years in youth as a hostage in the royal courts of the
Visigoths and the Huns and got his practical education there, rather than in
Roman schools. He was for all practical purposes a barbarian warlord who
happened to be Roman by birth, and played the game as well as any of the other
warlords of his age. His vulnerabilities were all on the Roman side of the
frontier, where the institutions of Roman society still retained a fingernail
grip on power, and so—having defeated the Visigoths, the Franks, the
Burgundians, and the massed armies of Attila the Hun, all for the sake of Rome’s
survival—he was assassinated by the emperor he served.
Fast forward close to two thousand years and it’s far from
difficult to see how the same pattern of elite extinction through the collapse
of political complexity will likely work out here in North America. The ruling
elites of our society, like those of the late Roman Empire, are superbly
skilled at manipulating and parasitizing a fantastically elaborate bureaucratic
machine which includes governments, business firms, universities, and many other
institutions among its components. That’s what they do, that’s what they know
how to do, and that’s what all their training and experience has prepared them
to do. Thus their position is exactly
equivalent to that of French aristocrats before 1789, but they’re facing the
added difficulty that the vast mechanism on which their power depends has
maintenance costs that their civilization can no longer meet. As the machine
fails, so does their power.
Nor are they particularly well prepared to make the transition
to a radically different way of exercising power. Imagine for a moment that one
of the current US elite—an executive from a too-big-to-fail investment bank, a
top bureaucrat from inside the DC beltway, a trust-fund multimillionaire with a
pro forma job at the family corporation, or what have you—were to turn up in
some chaotic failed state on the fringes of the industrial world, with no
money, no resources, no help from abroad, and no ticket home. What’s the
likelihood that, without anything other than whatever courage, charisma, and
bare-knuckle fighting skills he might happen to have, some such person could
equal Odoacer’s feat, win the loyalty and obedience of thousands of gang
members and unemployed mercenaries, and lead them in a successful invasion of a
neighboring country?
