The empty heart of the moral technocracy

Today's elite has neither technical competence, nor morality, but opportunistically uses these things to exile criticism from public life.

Tara McCormack’s excellent piece on Sensible Captain’s substack has been knocking around at the back of my mind for the past week. This piece argues that political authority is no longer based on the representation of class-based interests, but rather on two elements: first, a claim to technical or administrative competence, a rule by expertise and ‘what works’; and second, a moral claim of representing good against evil, right against wrong. These two elements of authority came particularly to light during the covid pandemic. Reading this, I had the following thoughts -

1. These two elements - of administrative competence and morality - were part of pre-political justifications for state rule. In the ancient near east, for example, kingship was justified partly in terms of able administration and also as representing ‘justice’ or the good. One Sumerian king talked of the gods raising him to power ‘to establish justice in the land…to bring wellbeing to the people of Sumer and Akkad’. Therefore, in our post-political period we are in some sense reverted to pre-political justifications for authority.

2. However, today’s elite is woefully lacking in administrative competence. This is not an era of able and diligent administrators. There is no one like Jean-Baptiste Colbert, who in the 17th century reformed the taxation and finances of the French state, as well as setting up industries, scientific academies and the merchant navy. The ancient Egyptian vizier gave daily judgement in his audience hall for petitioners, he sealed all wills, conferred with the king and principal advisers, and supervised military security, agriculture, transport of materials, building projects, and the judiciary. Our bureaucracy has nothing on the Chinese administration, which Hegel described in the following way: ‘Functionaries are appointed to superintend the roads, the rivers, and the coasts. Everything is arranged with the greatest minuteness. In particular, great attention is paid to the rivers; in the Shy-King are to be found many edicts of the Emperor, designed to secure the land from inundations.’ (1) The 15,000 Chinese mandarins were given an arduous training and subject to exacting standards, and everyone from the Emperor downwards was constantly examining their actions for the slightest fault. What is remarkable today is not the claim to technocracy, but the fact that the technical administration of the state has never been so poor. Rather than rationalising state finances, or performing public works, today’s administration burns billions on entirely ineffective or counterproductive projects. The covid period was when the technocratic claim to authority was at its highest; it was also the period when administrative incompetence reached unprecedented levels, when almost everything they did - at great public expense - had negative effects and it would have been better if they had done absolutely nothing at all.

3. Today’s claim to morality is also distinct. Morality traditionally was either connected with the essential basis of a social order (for example, sexual or religious rules), or alternatively was connected with the idea of what it meant to be a productive human being. In Kant, the morally ‘good’ is that which honors the humanity within us, which raises or develops the most human parts of our personality - while that which is morally bad is the lower parts, such as the animal or selfish parts. The claim of today’s elite to be doing the ‘right thing’ is only a picture book version of morality, which is bolted on to various policies in an opportunistic fashion. Vaccines are ‘good’, the unvaccinated are ‘bad’. The role of moral discourse is merely to exile questioning and debate from the public arena. Criticism of lockdowns or vaccine policies is not treated as legitimate, and requiring a response, but merely as the views of a non-person - the views of someone who is evil, a conspiracy theorist, who wants people to die, who is a racist/misogynistic/transphobic/covid-denier/climate denier, and therefore not worthy of a response or discussion. This is not a system of morality but rather a means of exiling criticism from the system. Today’s ‘good’ is therefore not a productive orientation, or the reflection of the values of a social order, but merely the act of exiling any critical element from the system. This is why no-platforming, censoring, shadow-banning and so on have become the mainstay of ‘moral’ activity.

4. Therefore, technical competence and morality can be workable bases for political order in some contexts. Today, however, these elements merely reflect an attempt to exile conflict and representation from the social system. This has no positive element to commend it (not even that of preserving state finances, or general ideas of human excellence or justice) and so is utterly vacuous and regressive.

(1) The Philosophy of History, GWF Hegel, Dover 1956, p126