Knowledge and decisions, p.55
Knowledge And Decisions, page 55
In short, the absence of articulated accountability is not an absence of accountability as such. Conversely, the presence of articulation, and of phrases about "the public interest" or "the people" does not imply accountability, whether such phrases are used by intellectuals, politicians, or corporate press agents copying their styles to convey a fashionable image of "corporate responsibility." The decisive knowledge that is conveyed, and responded to, is transmitted financially. Accountability is apparent not only in the dramatic cases where famous products or companies disappear, but more pervasively in the constant changing of products, corporate policies and/or managements to accomodate changing consumer preferences and changing technological and organizational possibilities.
That intellectuals tend to conceive of accountability solely in terms of their own processes of articulated rationality says more about the myopia or egocentricity of intellectuals than about the functioning of social processes. A businessman whose whole economic future is staked on the correctness of his assessments of consumer desires or technological possibilities is regarded by intellectuals as unaccountable, because he does not articulate to anyone. Conversely, psychiatrists, psychologists and social workers whose articulated assessments lead to dangerous criminals being turned loose are not accused of being unaccountable, even though they suffer no penalties for the robberies, assaults, or murders committed by those released-not even the embarrassment of having a personal box score kept on the criminals released on their recommendations.
Many of the same intellectuals who depict business as unaccountable to the public also deplore such things as television ratings and the proliferation of product models differing by nuances (automobiles, telephones, airline passenger sections)-all representing attempts to cater to public taste(s). Intellectuals' conceptions of making business accountable almost invariably involve making more articulation necessary-at stockholders' meetings, before government agencies, or public disclosures about internal business processes. Unarticulated accountability by results-product characteristics and prices-is either ignored or arbitrarily subordinated to articulation about processes, despite the fact that (almost by definition) a lay public is more likely to be able to judge tangible end results than to monitor complex specialized processes. Often proposals for accountability in the name of the public mean in practice articulation to intellectuals placed on corporate boards by government (or under threat of government action) as "public" representatives. Here the self-interest of intellectuals is even more apparent, and the claim of responsiveness to the desires of the general public even more questionable.
Nowhere is the meaning of "public" representation better illustrated than in so-called "public" television, where the tastes actually served are not those of the public but of atypical elites, favoring sports (soccer, tennis) different from those preferred by the public (baseball, football), favoring British soap operas ("Poldark," "Upstairs, Downstairs") rather than American, and rescuing performers who lost out in public popularity (Dick Cavett) compared to their competitors (Johnny Carson), but who happen to be favored by intel lectuals. The issue here is not about the artistic merits of these various entertainment productions, but about what "public" accountability means in practice, when conceived of as articulation rather than alternative processes for conveying public preferences.
Sometimes the supposed lack of "accountability" of corporate management is vis-a-vis stockholders, rather than the general public. The "separation of ownership and control" has long been regarded as a social "problem" to be "solved"-almost invariably by more articulation and/or political control. The possibility that such separation may be desired by stockholders themselves is ignored. Yet many stockholders have sufficient investments to form their own business and manage it-if they wanted to. Their preference for having someone else carry out the managerial functions is revealed by their purchase of stock. As stockholders, they monitor end-results-dividends-rather than attempt to monitor managerial processes. To allow other stockholders or "public" representatives to monitor managerial processes would be to deprive stockholders in general of the option of choosing to whom to entrust their investments. Those stockholders who might prefer being involved in management can of course hold stock in such corporations as choose to attract them by offering such terms, if such arrangements are sufficiently viable to allow such corporations to compete and survive.
Sometimes the business "concentration" that is attacked is based on the percentage of the market served ("controlled") by some small number of companies or the proportion of wealth or land owned by some given number or percent of businesses, families, or individuals. As noted in earlier discussions of so-called "income distribution," much of the individual and family data reflect different stages of a life cycle rather than people in one class rather than another-some of today's upper bracket people being yesterday's lower bracket people and some of today's lower bracket people being the children of today's upper bracket people. Business concentration figures are even trickier. Statements that, for example, 568 companies control 11 percent of the land area237 convey insinuations but no economic conclusion or even allegation, since 568 companies are not a decision-making unit, nor even a basis for a viable conspiracy-even if 11 percent of the land were enough to conspire with. To claim, as Ralph Nader does, that twenty-five landowners own more than 61 percent of California's private land238 is completely misleading. Not only do state and national government own a substantial part of California-reducing the true percentage well below the 61 percent figure-it is also important to realize that the so-called twenty-five "landowners" include thousands or millions of people, because of organizational ownership by corporations with vast numbers of stockholders. The full facts reveal not so much a concentration of land ownership among few people as a preference of many people to have their assets managed for them by professional managers.
Given the advantages of specialization, it is hard to imagine how various activities could fail to be "concentrated." Business concentration is simply arbitrarily singled out for detailed scrutiny and expose-style treatment, fraught with insinuations but devoid of empirically testable conclusions. The implicit premise is that there is something strange, unique, or sinister in such numerical relationships representing "concentration," when in fact such numerical relationships are commonplace throughout human endeavors. Anyone who watches professional basketball knows that less than 12 percent of the population supplies over half the basketball stars. Only 3 percent of the population grows all of the food, less than 1 percent of the population runs all of the post offices or drives all of the taxicabs. Indeed, far less than 1 percent of the population writes all the stories about small percentages of people controlling large percentages of activities. All the authors, editors and reporters in the country add up to much less than one percent of the population-and in fact less than one-twentieth as many people as proprietors, managers, and officials in business, who are supposed to represent "concentration" dangers.239 The simple underlying fact of advantages of specialization can be looked at in many ways, including the sinister insinuations chosen by intellectuals when discussing competing elites.
The discussion here of the political role of intellectuals has been almost exclusively a discussion of the role of politically liberal intellectuals because (1) the predominant political orientation of American intellectuals has been liberal and left, and (2) the small, politically far less influential, nonliberal intellectuals are a heterogeneous group, consisting of followers of specific economic or social principles-the "Chicago School" of economists (Milton Friedman, George Stigler, etc.), the sociologically oriented "Neo-conservatives" (Irving Kristol, James Q. Wilson, etc.) and conservatives in the more usual sense of people who follow traditional values (William F. Buckley, Russell Kirk, etc,). Unlike political liberalism, which can be reduced to a body of values, postulates or inferences,"' "conservatism," as the term is usually applied (to include all the varieties itemized above, for example), has little or no determinate content. If a conservative is someone who wants to conserve, then what specifically he wants to conserve depends upon what happens to exist, and this might be anything from the social-political system of eighteenth-century England to the contemporary Soviet Union. In short, the broad label "conservative" is itself virtually devoid of content, however much specific content there may be in each of the groupings and individuals to whom that label is loosely applied.
Because the great majority of intellectuals are liberal, it is essentially liberals who define what is meant by the term "conservative." In the liberal vision, conservatives are people who want to either preserve the status quo or go back to some earlier and "simpler" times. However politically effective such conceptions may be, in putting alternatives out of court, there are great cognitive difficulties with such characterizations. For example, there is not a speck of evidence that earlier times were in fact "simpler," though of course our knowledge of such times may be cruder. Moreover, the status quo in the United States and throughout much of Western Europe is a liberal-left status quo, entrenched for at least a generation. Alternatives to this are arbitrarily called "going back," even when these alternatives refer to social arrangements that have never existed (the monetary proposals of Chicago economists, for example), while proposals to continue or accelerate existing political-economic trends are called "innovative" or even "radical." Conservers of liberal or socialist institutions are never called by the perjorative term, "conservative." Neither are those who espouse the ideals, or repeat the very phrases, of 1789 France. In the broad sweep of history, the systemic advantages of decentralized decision making are a far more recent conception than the idea that salvation lies in concentrating power in the hands of the right people with the right principles. Adam Smith came two thousand years after Plato, but contemporary versions of the philosopher-king approach are considered new and revolutionary, while contemporary versions of systemic decentralization are considered "outmoded." Such expressions are themselves part of a vision in which ideas may be judged temporally rather than cognitively-what was adequate to older and simpler times being inadequate for the complexities of modern life.
The characteristics of the intellectual vision are strikingly similar to the characteristics of totalitarian ideology-especially the localization of evil and of wisdom, and psychic identification with the interests of great masses, whose actual preferences are ignored in favor of the overriding preferences of intellectuals. It is consistent with this that intellectuals have supported and indeed spearheaded the movement toward a centralization of political power in democratic nations and have apologized for foreign despotisms and totalitarianisms which featured like-minded people. Democratic traditions may create either internal ideological conflicts or an external pragmatic need to rhetorically paper over the totalitarian thrust of the intellectual vision. Here intellectual processes-definitional clarity, logical consistency, canons of evidence-are often sacrificed to the intellectual vision or the self-interest of the intellectual class. For example, antidemocratic processes may be described by democratic rhetoric as "participation" or "public" representation. Presumption may be substituted for evidence-past, present, or future-as in numerous arguments that the national I.Q. was declining, or existing evidence may be resolutely disregarded, as in claims that crime rates reflect social "root causes," or that "innovative" educational methods are more effective, or that sex education reduces the incidence of teenage pregnancy and venereal disease. In short, there is little to suggest that intellectuals' political positions reflect the intellectual process, and much to suggest that their positions reflect a vision and a set of interests peculiar to the intellectual class.
SUMMARY: EMBATTLED FREEDOM Freedom has always been embattled, where it has not been wholly crushed. The desire for freedom and for its opposite, power, are as universal as any human attributes. The nuclear age has added a new dimension to the struggle between them. So too has the rise to prominence of intellectuals as a social class with growing political aspirations, influence and/or dominance.
Almost by definition, the movement to totalitarianism is a one-way movement. No totalitarian government has ever chosen to become free or democratic, though a free and democratic nation may choose to move toward totalitarianism, as Germany did in 1933. If governmental choice were the only variable, the eventual worldwide triumph of totalitarianism would be inevitable, since choices in one direction are reversible and choices in the other direction are not. Nazi totalitarianism was smashed by external military power and its empire liberated by invading armies. But the invasion of Normandy that led to the liberation of Western Europe can hardly find a new counterpart to liberate Eastern Europe in a nuclear age. That the Western democracies had to stand by helplessly while Soviet tanks crushed Eastern European uprisings in the 1950s was grim proof of the new realities of nuclear annihilation. Perhaps in a very long run, political erosions might sap the vitality of totalitarianism or economic efficiency claims modify it incrementally (as it has already in agriculture) to the point where ultimately it no longer resembles its present centralized model. But even these remote hopes are lessened if the surviving examples of free and democratic nations are lost before this can happen.
In the nuclear era, the international survival of the nontotalitarian world rests ultimately on an American nuclear deterrent. Otherwise the nuclear power of the Soviet Union would be irresistible as a threat in international power politics, whether or not it was ever actually used. Seldom has the sur vival of human freedom rested so decisively in the hands of one government, or the survival of the species in just two.
The spread of totalitarianism-communism since World War 11-has been at the expense of all kinds of nontotalitarian governments: a democracy in Czechoslovakia, a kingdom in Laos, a Latin American autocracy in Cuba. These various forms of government, whatever their merits or demerits otherwise, tend to be changeable. A dictatorship like Spain could liberalize after Franco, and Portugal could swing to the left after Salazar. As of any given moment, some of these governments might seem not very different in their degrees of freedom from communist dictatorships. But a communist dictatorship has a permanence that these other forms of government cannot approach. Inasmuch as most of the governments on the planet are nondemocratic as well as noncommunist, stemming the spread of totalitarianism necessarily means American cooperation with nondemocratic nations. To some Americans, but especially intellectuals, such cooperation appears as a violation of the democratic creed, and should be contingent on the nondemocratic nation's adoption of democratic institutions. This is a special case of the general implicit assumption of a single scale of values applicable to all. The historical recency and rarity of constitutional democracy makes the universal application of such a model especially egocentric and arbitrary. As a precondition for cooperation to stem the tide of an irreversible totalitarianism, it suggests either a low estimate of the threat or an unwillingness to face the historic responsibility implied by it. The central assumption of a single scale of values applicable to all is a force in domestic as well as international politics. It has facilitated the imposition of many specific laws and policies resented by the population, and-more important-it has altered the enduring political framework to make such impositions possible through courts, administrative agencies, and other institutions and processes insulated from public feedback and responsive to smaller, more zealous constituencies. Domestically as well as internationally, freedom as the general preservation of options gives way to the imposition of one group's preferred option. Their influence greatly exceeds their numbers, partly because they are perceived as objective "experts" and partly because of the moral nature of their arguments and the apparently moral high ground that they themselves occupy (as contrasted with the arguments of conventional special interest groups in these respects).
The moralistic approach to public policy is not merely a political advantage to those seeking greater concentration of power. Moralism in itself implies a concentration of power. More justice for all is a contradiction in terms, in a world of diverse values and disparate conceptions of justice itself. "More" justice in such a world means more forcible imposition of one particular brand of justice-i.e., less freedom. Perfect justice in this context means perfect tyranny. The point is not merely semantic or theoretical. The reach of national political power into every nook and cranny has proceeded in step with campaigns for greater "social justice." A parent forced by the law and income to send his child off to a public school where he is abused or terrorized by other children is painfully aware of a loss of freedom, however much distant theoreticians talk of justice as they forcibly unsort people, and however safe the occupational advantages of intellectuals remain from governmental power.
The myopic conception of freedom as those freedoms peculiar to intellectuals, or formal constitutional guarantees, ignores the many ways in which options can be forcibly removed by administrative or judicial fiat, or by the government's ability to structure financial or other incentives in such a way as to impose high costs or grant high rewards according to whether individuals and organizations do what the government wants done-whether or not the government has any explicit statutory or constitutional authority for controlling such behavior. More than a century ago, John Stuart Mill saw the dangers in the growth of the extralegal powers of government:
Every function superadded to those already exercised by the government causes its influence over hopes and fears to be more widely diffused, and converts, more and more, the active and ambitious part of the public into hangers-on of the government, or of some part which aims at becoming the government. If the roads, the railways, the banks, the insurance offices, the great joint-stock companies, the universities, and the public charities were all of them branches of the government; if, in addition, the municipal corporations and local boards, with all that now devolves on them, became departments of the central administration; if the employees of all these different enterprises were appointed and paid by the government, and looked to the government for every rise in life; not all the freedom of the press and popular constitution of the legislature would make this or any other country free otherwise than in name."'
