Selection from the anonymous writer “P. K. W.” ’s collection of essays, discovered and published after his suicide by his family.
For too long the effort to improve the future has been conceived as a grand orchestra, where some select elite of technocratic and altruistic miracle-workers work ceaselessly to produce a highly planned and directed performance, by which the collective spirit of humanity will uplifted in an eternal act of art. Of course, any brilliant orchestra also requires its equally brilliant conductor, and many well-meaning and highly intelligent men (and it is almost always men) vie for that role with gusto and vigour. For the rest of us, then, we are consigned to the role of the polite audience, to observe and not intervene while the performance is in motion and to applaud gratefully when it ends. And when the audience grows unruly, when the music takes an unpopular turn, is the artist to bow to the whims of the crowd? Our great-man inflected theories of progress tell us no. If you ask the people what they want, they will ask for faster horses. Better then to circumvent them altogether and give them the finale they do not know they want, and wait for the flowers when the curtains close.
It is these theories of change that power the robber barons (and their modern counterparts) who believe that God or some benevolent philosophy requires them to become as rich as possible to give their wealth away in ways that they alone see fit as captains of industry. It is these theories that lead well-meaning men to sigh and bemoan the short-sightedness of the crowds of populist voters, and wistfully imagine some world-government in which the deserving finally get the chance to enact their long hoped-for reforms. It is these theories that inspire the scurries of planning in which present society, riddled with sickness and corruption, is rooted out by a cadre of revolutionary visionaries and replaced with some new golden city on the hill. In these theories the “audience” loses their status as human beings, with unique dignity and a right to express their desires, and become reduced to quantities of obstinate friction, a stubborn physical constant to be overcome or manipulated to the benefit of the innovators and disruptors of the world. This is of course not to say that humans cannot be short sighted, venal, or act in counterproductive ways – it is to say that to presume that of the vast majority of the population places one in a category of narcissism and hubris shared only by a small number of manipulators, abusers, and dictators (who, as it so happens, make for rather poor company).
Furthermore, such theories almost universally assume that the present state of failure and suffering can be escaped through some grand and concerted effort, whereby society moves to some higher state rid of its many ills and the hoi polloi can at last live in harmonious bliss. To this, I repeat Dr. Manhattan’s famous line from the end of Watchmen: “Nothing ends, Adrian. Nothing ever ends.” If you, o great leader, are willing to suspend such fickle and small things as civil liberties and fundamental human rights for our present state of extraordinary emergency, will you do so again when in ten or twenty years some new emergency emerges? When I hear proposals where elections are suspended or states of emergency imposed, I think not of promised futures but of military dictatorships, of the Acerbo law in 1923 and the Reichstag fire decree in 1933.
But! I hear you exclaim. I am not like those failed men, I am ethical and moral, so say me and all my friends. I feel great pain at the suffering humanity experiences, and have dedicated myself not to self-aggrandisement but to easing that pain. My plans are gentle and correct according to all the mathematical and scientific means known to me, philosophically watertight and free of common error. Yet humans are not motivated by mathematical rigour or logical consistency. That great dream which moves you to shake the world, is it as great as Gran Columbia or the Soviet Union? The nature of biases, prejudices, and blind spots is that they are invisible to their holder, and the nature of power is that one does not know oneself until one wields it. Extreme demands for authority require extreme justifications, and in many ways self-assurance marks one as unfit for duty rather than uniquely suited for power: ask yourself, do you truly act with incorrigible moral integrity and absolute adherence to your stated ethical standards? Do you even know what your standards are, or the true meaning of your utilitarian calculus? On the way to the ice-cream shop today I passed a homeless man, and did not look twice. I count myself unfit to wield supreme power.
The world is not composed of simple binaries, wolves and sheep, alphas and betas, leaders and followers. To imagine yourself a man of steel is a grave moral crime, against yourself and those who you claim to be helping. The path forward then resembles less the grand orchestral vision and more a messy, pluralistic patchwork: small changes in small areas, collected over time. Act to inspire rather than direct, to suggest rather than impose. The human forces against which the interests of humanity are arrayed are vast and organised, and to meet their challenge we will need to organise also, but not into the empire of the good and just. To listen to others is the fundament of morality, to serve without glory its highest expression. I can offer no roadmap or scheme – to do so goes against everything I have written above this line. The answer is both much greater and much smaller, much more complex and much simpler, than that.
Good luck.