While at Sea time to Think

Our regular columnist, Terry Field, a businessman and trained economist, sometimes of Normandy, France and sometimes of Florida, is now crossing the Atlantic en route by ship to his winter home in America. Whilst on board he has had time to reflect on an article he recently read written by President-Elect Trump's new White House adviser Stephen Bannon, former Breitbar News executive. Mr. Field has the ability to look back into history and forward into the future.  Intriguing reading this Sunday morning.

As it is bitter cold in Pennsylvania this January at dawn, I have embedded several photographs from the summer garden of my Viet Nam Army comrade, Leo Wiley Hansen who lives in Iowa.  Together, we both served at chaplain's assistants with the 1st Infantry Division in 1969, a war now part of the fabric of American hubris. - Glenn N. Holliman

A Reflection whilst at Sea

by Terry Field

The GOP wishes to maintain the power and wealth of the rich, but attract the votes of the poor. That their constituency is composed of white people is also something they would like to change, requires one to ask if there is any longer a common interest between ‘capital’ and ‘labour’. Such thinking is alien to the American mind, which is in general practical rather than analytical of social matters. Social concepts are a tradition in Europe – with all the killing such thinking has engendered.

But it is central to the dilemma of the GOP.

I suggest it cannot protect conservative economic management, maintain capital, and at the same time buy the votes of the partially dispossessed by income subsidy. Where mass income subsidy of the poor – working and non-working is offered in Europe, the protection of the owners of concentrated capital has been almost wholly abandoned.

Left, a driveway entrance at Wiley Hansen's Iowa home last summer.  In a complicated world, flowers brighten everyone's day.  Both Terry Field and his wife, Fina, are also fabulous gardeners. 

We have to start where our history has formed us.

Since the discovery of the American continent by Europeans about five hundred years ago, there has been a long, continuous period of colonization and exploitation. During that period, the resources of all kinds that the continent affords have been exploited, by a massive migration of European peoples, whilst lives became progressively more replete with material well-being. The auto-destruction of the competitor continent, in wars that raged through the first half of the twentieth century, left the United States in 1945 with unparalleled absolute and relative wealth, power, control and capacity to self-determine the future of its people and their lives.

Since human beings appeared upon the planet, the period from 1870 to 1930 saw a change in the condition of the entire population of Americans such that their lives were all but unrecognisable when compared not only to prior generations, but also to those less fortunate inhabitants of all other places on earth, save perhaps for the three great European powers, and particularly Britain, which at that time experienced equally spectacular wealth, power, control and social stability.

From 1945 until the present, the United Kingdom has experienced continued decline, impoverishment, increasing irrelevance, and dangerously growing social divisions. The accession of Britain to the EEC (now the EU) is now being dismantled, in the context of a nation that is de-industrialised, massively indebted, possessed of vast unproductive real estate wealth, and at the same time suffering poor trading performance, reduced tax take from the crisis of 2007/8, and socially divided by the nationalist exclusives who voted for brexit, and the social liberals who wished to remain in the EU.

The message for Britain is uncomfortable. Poverty and inequity produces social instability, which in turn breeds political extremism, and the cycle spirals down. Possibly to an ungovernable state. The modern phrase of ‘failed state’ may become the description of Britain should ‘brexit’ be a disaster.

The relevance to the United States of the British experience is clear.

Both powers have experienced much better times, in terms of shared pleasures and the feeling of inclusiveness by the majority of the people of the two very different societies.  The never-before experienced super-control and super-prosperity of America has given way to a jostling-of-the-shoulders with the rest of the world.

Until recently, nearly all the Americans believed with some justification that they could command capital, events, outcomes. That this is an illusion, and no longer applies, is not understood by many in America. The belief in self-determined outcomes is a powerful American psychological prop. It is a core element of American self-image, and it drives the confidence of the people who voted for Obama with ‘Yes we can!’, and now Trump with ‘build the wall’.

Both positions are illusory.

The unpleasant reality is that the world of 7,500 million people are more and more competing for survival. And they are doing it more and more effectively.

The statement in (Stephen Bannon's) article of December refers to Trump’s advisory stance as:

"The globalists gutted the American working class and created a middle class in Asia. The issue now is about Americans looking to not get f—ed over. If we deliver, we’ll get 60 percent of the white vote, and 40 percent of the black and Hispanic vote and we’ll govern for 50 years."

There was no such ‘decision’ to destroy in American industrial cities and build up societies in Asia. That never happened. At least not in America. It may have been the thinking of the Chinese communist party strategists, but the process was essentially that of an automaton. Capital moves where it will. It seeks a yield. Nothing else.

Global capital movements are not the result of conscious forces, designed to achieve the outcomes Bannon identifies. That they have happened was predictable, of course, since capital could no more remain in America than water can stay in a colander.

The chain of causation was entirely different, and the out-turns expected were unrelated to ‘hollowing out’. Or ‘making an Asian middle class’.

In 1969 at the Lai Kai base camp, Viet Nam, Wiley filled an wooden ammunition box with dirt and seeds. That long, hot summer marigolds flowered brightening homesick, anxious lives.  His green thumb is still active almost a half century later as his Iowa garden apply demonstrates.

As Terry notes in this article Americans still have a mind-set that they (we) have the power to direct the world.  As hundreds of thousands of U.S. soldiers discovered in southeast Asia decades ago, such power is limited, very limited.  

In thousands of boardrooms, the directors attended classes at business school that told them that China was now ‘open for business’. That was all anyone needed. The rest is known.

Millions of decisions to invest incrementally overseas by enormous numbers of people became possible from the appearance of electronic neurons.

Computers enrobe the earth. They set so many agendas. Now, because of the digital mind that suffuses our existence, all economic and social life is changing and will continue so to do. The future is unknowable in ways that make the past look set in concrete.

The consequences of a world set free, without empires to constrict potential, without communist regimes and fascist regimes to brutalise, with instant contact from anywhere to anywhere and everywhere, there is no longer the intact national society.

As I write this, the next symposium of the largest 800 cities of the world is being planned – the last was in London. The cities of the world are the neurons of the planet. The switching points, the elements of high consciousness of the global human ‘mind’. Between these nodes are the vast swathes of the ‘countryside’. Increasingly depopulated, increasingly the preserve of the less-endowed, in terms of assets, education, intellect and mindfulness, the countryside is becoming a place apart.

In the great cities, and belts of cities in the old nation-states, the composite human mind is fashioning a new life for the clever to inhabit.

Intellectual difference is the new apartheid. As is age difference also.

The nearest to this new world I know of from the past is the flowering, albeit on a small scale, of the Dutch state after the withdrawal of the Spanish. Those newly free peoples, blessed with a flat society and good education, caused an explosion of achievement that infected the English, and showed them the way to a new democratic and collective effort of will. That essentially ‘local’ inheritance of the life of the mind, leavened by immense physical resources has run its course. Now the global mind is being created.

Set against this new world, the harvesting of the rural vote to hijack the national government of a society possessed of the most sophisticated city-based society yet seen on earth has profound implications for social dislocation.

It is barely worth the digital ink to pour scorn on the idea of American National socialism as defined by the ‘harvest the votes of the excluded, spend a trillion on rejuvenating unusable industries and ‘infrastructure’, then subsidise them to have a life of ‘dignity’.

Directed state investment of this type is wasted before the first sod is turned – might as well make paper mache artwork with the wasted dollars. As for the rejuvenation of labour hording industry – I suggest a more probable gain would be had by researching the way the earth could best be supported on the back of the turtle.

Economics is a hard task master. Nothing is for nothing. Waste resources on a dream, and poverty in the future surely follows. Bannon is an economic and social dinosaur. He has failed by the mediocrity of his own delusional thinking.

It is far more likely that the disillusioned American rural poor, let down by the failure of this latest attempt at state power misused, will become ungovernable in a couple of decades time.

Just as Hitler’s creative finance minister generated growth and demand through public works that ended in financial instability that only war could disguise, so will Bannon’s monumental hubristic dreamscape cause agony, rage and alienation.

A central problem for the American mind is on display here.

These duped people believe in the ‘American Dream’ of the big corporate saviour – the Yankee hero who will remake their world anew.

There is a hollowed-out view of what an individual amounts to in both America and Britain – both countries have abandoned the idea and significance of the ‘citizen’ – the operative reality is the ‘consumer’ – better to be employed by a great corporation than to be a free small-scale citizen. The former is rich, the latter generally not.

It is an economic version of the Stockholm syndrome – where the  captured associate with the interests of their captors.

The conditions that led to vast numbers of the poor in the west becoming richer through raw new capitalism are gone for good.

There are no new continents to discover and to dominate anew. There are no peoples to kill to settle virgin lands, there is only a vast human population, in most regions aging, and facing chronic resource and climatic problems.

The future for mankind now is full of danger; the idea of national ‘tribal’ dominance offered by such as Trump will fail, but in the process, the idea of the nation state will fail with it.

How so with the new power, China? A highly centralized nationally xenophobic society. Can they also change, like a chrysalis – into a component set of the new connected world?

It is already happening.

The great cities of China connect with the other cities of the world, in ways that make those relationships far more relevant than their relationship with the countryside of China.

No longer ammunition boxes but pots and pots of color bursting into our lives.  Thanks Wiley, friend of my youth.  After almost 50 years my comrade in arms and I have reconnected thanks to the Internet.  The electronic web that Terry writes about in this article indeed does tie the world closer together.

China and America a deeply intertwined in gigantic energy-supply projects that will allow the cities of both geographical regions to survive and prosper. Their intellectual inter-dependence will deepen – their cleverest will become people with layers of loyalty – yes to China, but also to the city, and certainly to the world of other cities they move around, both in cyberspace and in real space, to live their lives. 

There is no longer a ‘first world’ defined by nations.

There is a first world defined by the minds of the clever, coming together effortlessly, based in which the city makes sense for the activity of the moment.

Our emotional lives (and particularly in the countryside) are focused on the society, and its problems, of half a century ago. But our intellectual lives - particularly if we happen to be very clever – inhabit a world entirely new. Totally intimate even across immense distance, where the achievements we leave behind are made with people we could never have even known were we to live our grand-parents lives.

Now tell me Trump, Bannon, the sadly failed and desperate are even of relevance.

But his brand of nonsense needs to be seen to fail. Along the way however, he can do damage, and at the worst, pointless ‘State’ structures may unleash violence and death across the planet, as their ‘solutions’ collapse in disaster. Opportunistic warfare is so often a foil to hide an incompetent government.

And it is universal suffrage, applied at the level of the nation state, that is the vehicle that allows all this to happen.

  

I am Terence Field, and I approve this message!

Comments?