Why Culture Must Lead

(history shows that it is the precursor to good government)

Looking around the world, one might reasonably wonder whether good government is even possible. It surely is, but my proposal today is that to get there we must reverse the widely-held belief that it is the government's job to create conditions in which a healthy culture can flourish. Quite the opposite is true: It is culture that must create the conditions in which good government becomes a possibility.

Here's a thought experiment: Ask yourself how many people have come to see good government as an impossible dream? Not a small percentage I would guess. And if I'm right in that, and good government has become, in the minds of many, a hopeless aspiration, does that not suggest that our whole approach to the matter has in some way gone wrong? We seem to have a choice then: Abandon the project (which many have done), or seek to understand in what way our approach has gone wrong.

As it turns out, the suggestion that we've got things reversed lacks neither precedent nor historical evidence. In the 18th century, the English poet and painter William Blake said:

The arts and sciences are the destruction of tyrannies or bad governments. Why should good government endeavour to repress what is its chief and only support? The foundation of empire [let's today consider that to mean governance] is art and science. Remove them and empire is no more. Empire follows Art, and not vice versa as Englishmen suppose.

Nearly 200 years later, Vaclav Havel, who was instrumental in ending years of Soviet-inspired darkness in the Czech Republic, noted that political reform had not led to Czech society’s re-awakening, but the other way around.

Defining the world 'culture' however, even though we all have a good feeling for it, is in the end not so easy. While I won't tackle that problem of definition extensively here, I would point to one of the more fundamental criteria: It is 'that which arises freely from the people'. All sports, culinary traditions, architectural styles, and musical and literary input to social evolution, all that inspired people to give their best to the world, arose in that way. And, perhaps more important to note, so did all the webs of scientific principles, and richly varied educational models, social values and norms, all the noblest and most inspired vision of human potential, all of history's great thinkers and social reformers. That is, they 'co-evolved' with the more artistic elements of culture listed above. Political ideologues on the other hand, do not have a strong history of enriching human society. Politics is a sphere that should be concerned with a limited range of administrative matters, not the design, or rulership, or ownership of society.

Culture is the essence of being human, and the sphere in which what is most human in us can emerge. It is the place where even the ideologically opposed find common ground. How destructive then is the constant weakening of cultural institutions and activities, which today are diminished in volume as well as commercially and politically compromised in expression? We should rightly be shocked when we stand back and notice that one of the defining features of our own time is that almost nothing 'emerges freely from the people'. The world of government and the world of the corporation have more and more divided everything up between them, and participation from the populace has been almost entirely eradicated. Education is controlled by governments we don't believe in (in combination with vast, and somewhat hidden, 'educational corporations'). Science, likewise, is controlled almost entirely by commercial powers. Pop stars are manufactured. Leisure and entertainment must be purchased from the corporations. Sports stars are property. In general, the citizenry have no participation in anything, except as corporate employees and participants in a voting process made obscure by money and media.

There have been times and places where the balance of cultural input was better: When the French philosopher and political scientist Alexis de Tocqueville visited 19th century America, he attributed the country's vibrance, dynamism and forward momentum to its tremendous range of civic and cultural engagement. And he predicted that should that participation one day cease, we would see in its place “an immeasurable multitude... all equal and alike”, above which “stands an immense and tutelary power which takes upon itself alone to secure their gratifications and to watch over their fate. That power is absolute, minute, regular... It would be like the authority of a parent, if like that authority, its object was to prepare men for manhood - but it seeks on the contrary to keep them in perpetual childhood”.¹

Tocqueville was of course talking about the state, and its relationship to society, absent the counterbalance of strong civic and cultural activity. All over the world today, such free engagement is indeed absent. Niall Ferguson says that it was destroyed by well-intentioned ´nanny-statism´.² Noam Chomsky has suggested it was systematically and deliberately destroyed by corporate business from World War Two onwards, and Robert Putnam has suggested it fell victim to technology. One might imagine all three have a grain of truth. Anyway, the massive decline of civic and cultural life is a reality, and all of those commentators speak of the urgency of reviving it. They are not the only ones. Former British diplomat Carne Ross has declared the current form of the state fundamentally amoral, and called for the urgent creation of new institutions enabling wider public participation.³ Former high level CIA agent Kevin Shipp has echoed that call. Journalist Ignacio Ramonet asserts that public debate and engagement is the only motor of social change that there is or can be. And when economists Paul Fritjers and Gigi Foster reviewed all that had gone wrong during 'the covid years' prominent among their conclusions were a) the need for health institutions to be more independent of government, and b) a proposal that 'citizen's juries' be involved in appointments to high public office.⁴ That's in fact a pretty remarkable spectrum of consensus: a conservative Scottish history professor, a leading American left-wing intellectual, a Harvard political scientist, a British former diplomat turned author, activist and anarchist, a man who calls himself 'a recovering CIA agent', a socialist journalist and newspaper editor, a Dutch professor of Well-being Economics from the London School of Economics and an Australian economist from the University of New South Wales.

We do not want to go back to anything however. We want to go forward. When civic society comes back in the 21st century, it's scale and scope, it's responsibilities in the world, must be bigger, and different, than before. We are ready for that. It is part of the new world which we must make our way toward.

My argument on all this must be expanded on some future occasion. On many future occasions. But my opening shot on the subject is this: If we are to gain any foothold on the immense, indeterminate and difficult transition which is now in its early stages, if we are to get any kind of handle on where we are and where we might be going next, what will be needed is not more political doctrine to be imposed by governmental (and increasingly commercial) structures. It is orienting and enabling principles for those millions who make up society. Let's today just have the first of them on the table. The one on which all the others will rest. The one that says culture, not government, is where progress toward a healthy society begins – both in itself and in turn as a precursor to good government.

1. 'Democracy in America', Alexis de Toqueville 1835

2. 'The Rule of Law and its Enemies', BBC Reith Lectures by Niall Ferguson 2011, https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01jmx0p

3. 'The Leaderless Revolution', Carne Ross, 2011

4. 'The Great Covid Panic', Paul Fritjers, Gigi Foster, Michael Baker, 2021