I never visited the old
Soviet Union. This may be a bit of a surprise, especially considering my
youthful left-wing politics but I was really too young to be taken in. I was
born in the year of the Hungarian uprising and one of the first big
international events I can recall is the Prague Spring and its subsequent
brutal suppression by Brezhnev’s tanks. I grew up with the understanding that
whatever the attractions of Marxist-Leninist political theory its actual
application in the real world had failed to live up to expectations. So, I felt
no more desire to go there than I did Apartheid-era South Africa. I have
actually been to both Russia and South Africa since the fall of those two
regimes and I may write more about them some day. But for today I want to focus
on just one aspect of the totalitarian state that emerged after the 1917
revolution.
Joseph Stalin was a monster. There is no serious doubt about
that. He was responsible for the death of more of his own countrypeople than
any other person in modern history. He constructed a state in which his control
over people’s lives was all-pervasive. He, and his party apparatus could, and
did, direct every aspect of life in the Soviet Union. The extent of his power
was nearly absolute and he used it with great enthusiasm. Stalin probably came
to believe that his power actually was absolute and that his word was law in
all respects. And that was where some of his problems lay.
Unlike King Canute, whose command to the sea that it should
recede was intended to demonstrate to courtiers the limits of kingly power,
Stalin really did appear to believe that he could order nature to bend to his
will. Science in the Soviet Union was constrained to operate within ground
rules laid down by the Party. Where it furthered the aims of the Party it was
supported and financed to the extent that it achieved stunning success in
fields such as space flight. The state also funded so-called science that followed
its agenda but was built on a tissue of falsehood and ideological positions in
place of observation and experiment. The career of Trofim Lysenko came to
symbolise this tendency but it was not the only example.
It wasn’t only in natural sciences that the dead hand of the
Party forced ideological solutions that simply didn’t work. Economic theories
based on a command economy and isolation - “Socialism in One Country” – caused
the resources of the empire to be squandered and most the people to be
impoverished while a small number of Party insiders enjoyed such wealth as was
available. In Stalin’s own time there were probably enough old people around
with memories of the last days of the Czars that it was possible to keep a lid
on things. As that generation died out
the contradictions in the system became less and less tenable and Stalin’s
successors were unable to do so any more. Eventually the whole thing fell apart
in 1989 and the Soviet Empire fell as surely as Empires have eventually fallen
throughout human history.
Regular readers – assuming I have any – will probably have
already realised where this is going. Since the fall of the Soviet Union the
United States has been the dominant world power and I have no doubt that among
its political establishment there are many who believe its power is near
absolute. Leaving aside the rise of China in recent decades it is a supportable
position.
Although the United States like the Soviet Union was born in
revolution, the nature of that revolution was quite different. The founding
fathers of the USA were men (predominantly) of the Enlightenment. They tried
very hard to be guided by empiricism and reason, explicitly confining the
irrational (religion) to the personal realm and separating it from the
management of the state. It proved to be a good model and as a result the new state
prospered and was able to parlay its abundant natural resources into wealth
greater than any other country has ever seen. Along the way it remained substantially
true to its founding ideals and offered its military might to support others
who shared those ideals, notably in the two world wars of the 20th
century.
It is a truism however that no human construct is ever
perfect and there have undoubtedly been imperfections in the United States. The
support of slavery by some of the states led to the horrendous civil war of the
19th century. The discrimination against black people even after the
end of slavery was a shameful stain on the country. Fear and suspicion of
different ways to organise a country led to irrational foreign-policy
positions, some of which caused great harm and suffering around the world.
These imperfections, some of them substantial, must be set against the
successes but overall it is possible to make a solid case that the United
States of America has been broadly a force for good in the world. On the whole
it has applied its founding principles of reason and justice to improve the lot
of its own people and many in other nations.
This legacy of sustained progress towards a better world is
constantly under threat. There have always been those that reject the founding principles
and seek to change the country for their own purposes. These purposes are often
around personal enrichment at the expense of others. Sometimes they are based
on religious irrationality and sometimes on misguided ideas of the innate
superiority of one section of humanity over the rest. Sometimes it is hard to
tell where one ends and the others begin. The framers of the US Constitution
understood these threats and built in the famous checks and balances to guard
against them. In general they have been successful for two and a half centuries
but their continuation into the future is by no means guaranteed.
In the modern world the aspiration to manage affairs by means
of reason is best exemplified by science. Science is not a list of formulae or
a laboratory full of bubbling apparatus although both these things may play
their part. Science is a method of investigating and thinking about the world
to better understand its workings. Its tools are observation, experiment,
reasoning and collaboration. It has been stupendously successful in enabling
humans to live the lives they do with the comforts they enjoy, free from many
of the dangers that used to beset us. It is also profoundly democratic. No
scientist, however exalted, can successfully defend a position when the
evidence contradicts it. The laws of physics care nothing for the status of the
physicist. To quote a t-shirt I have seen recently, “The great thing about
science is that it is true whether you believe it or not”. Failure to understand
and accept this truth contributed to the fall of the Soviet Empire. My great
concern is that the United States could go the same way.
Creationism is an obvious issue. Somewhere between a third
and a half of American adults believe that the Earth was created around 6,000
years ago. By itself this probably doesn’t matter very much. The practical
implications for day to day life are small. Separation of religion from civil
power means that this irrational belief can do little harm. The problem is that
in order to support that belief it is necessary to discard a huge proportion of
the findings of science: geology, astronomy, physics – including kinetic
theory, thermodynamics, electromagnetic theory, nuclear physics - chemistry and genetics. These scientific fields
are supported by many years, or even centuries, of observation and experiment.
Together they provide a coherent description of the universe that enables us to
survive and prosper as a species. It is no exaggeration to suppose that our
future security and prosperity depend on the continuation of the victory of
reason over superstition. If the protections that the founding fathers built in
to the Constitution are eroded and the workings of the state become predicated
on irrationality the dangers are evident.
The new American president has said that he believes climate
change is a hoax concocted by the Chinese in order to fetter US industry. If he
genuinely believes this it is an irrational belief not dissimilar to the belief
that the universe was created in six days 6,000 years ago. Unlike a belief in
young-Earth creationism this piece of irrationality has direct and grave
consequences. It provides a pretext for policy decisions that are demonstrably
harmful to the majority while helping a small minority to become wealthier.
Precisely the thing that Washington, Jefferson et al sought to avoid.
Apparently President Trump has also decreed a GDP growth
rate of 4% for the US economy in order to justify some of his financial plans.
This is a small step for a man who is prepared to deny basic science and in
some ways it is less challenging. Economists have a knack of making
measurements that suit their expectations – a habit that real scientists are
trained for years to avoid. I must say that when I heard this story I was
immediately put in mind of the old Soviet Union where Brezhnev would decree the
number of tractors to be produced in a five year plan and produced they would
be. Whether any of them were actually fit to do real work was another matter.
If Trump’s America produces a notional 4% GDP growth but fails to improve
living conditions for its people who will benefit?
Denial of science and denial of economic data appear to be
par for the course in the new world of Washington DC. In just a few weeks I
have lost count of the time that President Trump has been caught in easily-demonstrable
falsehoods. It is rapidly becoming the new normal. Over time the most dedicated
fact-checkers and myth-busters will be worn down. It may even become a little
quaint to expect to hear truth from power. Trump hasn’t yet claimed a round of
golf with eleven holes in one as Kim Jong Il infamously did, but some of his
boasts are straying into dangerously similar territory. And on the other side
of the coin, speaking truth to power may become almost as dangerous as it was
in the Soviet Union or is today in North Korea.
I suppose what it comes down to is this. Denial of evidence,
lies and manipulation may keep a government in power in the short to medium
term but eventually the dam will break. It worked for Stalin, less so for his
successors. For the Soviet Union the fall when it came was absolute. Donald
Trump may be able to hold his mentirocracy* together for a while but eventually
it will give way. The Constitution of the United States should prevent a
collapse exactly like that of the Soviet Union. But to do that it needs people
in power who believe in its aims. That’s the bit I am worried about at the
moment.
* A Government based on lies and falsehoods. I
think I just invented that word but I am open to correction.
