( The Rise of Political Darwinism)
The American presidential election has now come and gone. But not so its ripples. It was a political earthquake which stunned and shocked many parts of the globe into utter silence and disbelief. Never in history has an American presidential election held the rest of the world in such rapt attention. It was as if the fate and future of humanity depended on this single election.
The rancour, the frenzy, the sheer nastiness and personalization of issues that drove the campaign might have induced an atmosphere of hysteria. It is rare to find two presidential candidates harbouring such mutual loathing and intense personal dislike for each other. If this were to be the golden age of American public duelling, only God knows how this would have ended. In earlier climes, one could hear the thunderous bellow: “Name your second!” The fact that the other contestant happens to be a woman did not seem to matter.
No two presidential candidates could have been more dissimilar in temperament and background: the one a calmly ruthless, impeccably credentialed scion of the establishment with a reputation for being clever by half, the other a boisterously single-minded anti-establishment rabble-rouser and gladiator of crony capitalism who delights in cocking a snook at the same establishment that has permitted him to rise to the top of the economic pile while breaking most of the rules.
As one commentator wryly put it, America was saddled with two presidential candidates, one that ought to be in jail and the other that ought to be in an asylum.But the entire drama is also a reflection of just how the new forces of communication are turning the world into a vast global village. The world is a-changing indeed and no corner of the globe, no dark and dingy corner is too remote for the relentless beams of satellite gadgets.
Now that all is quiet on the American front, it is time to take some lessons away for the rest of humanity. A hard-headed pragmatist, Donald Trump may be learning his first lessons in presidential politics. Having pooh-poohed and demonized globalization in the course of his campaigns, he may yet discover that the institutional and pan-national forces that drive globalization are beyond the reach of an American president however powerful and single-minded. His volte-face on Obama care may also suggest a growing awareness of certain institutional disincentives which prevent a slide into political deviancy and delinquency.
What the rest of the world must now determine is whether the Trump triumph is a mere corrective glitch in the American political system or part of the global resurgence of right-wing fascism, a recrudescence of political Darwinism and neo-Con brutality which abolishes all societal safety nets in favour of open competition and the free market where everybody must test their strength and nerve.
It has been noted by perceptive observers that contemporary western societies through some post-war consensus and intelligent design oscillate between the two extremes of liberal permissiveness and radical sloth and the conservative rerouting of society towards prudence and competitiveness.
It is all there in the famous image of the Machiavelli-Leninist stick of societal progress. Whenever your ideological adversaries bend the stick of human development too far in the wrong ideological direction, you seize the stick and bend it in the other extreme direction. It is only then that you can come to the golden mean through a subtle aggregation of societal impulses and aspirations.
So whenever left-wing liberality pushes the vision thing too far by turning the state into a huge alms house and citizens into over-pampered human wrecks who feed fat on the system without contributing anything to its development and economic growth, right-wing conservatism halts the ideological drivel by insisting that those who do not work do not deserve to eat and neither do they deserve health care.
The right-wing resurgence and the triumph of Donald Trump can be seen as a backlash against Obama care and what is seen as an attempt to cripple human initiative and the innate ability of all humanity to lift themselves up by the bootstraps and to contribute meaningfully to the society. The modern state is not a patrimonial benefactor of mendicants and laggard flotsam and jetsam of the society but an unobtrusive arbiter and regulator in the unremitting acquisitive contest that drivesocieties to new heights of progress and prosperity.
It was not for nothing that Margaret Thatcher was known as Thatcher the milk snatcher. The iron lady, daughter of a Methodist alderman who was brought up with thrift and Calvinist restraint, could not understand what the fuss was all about in the removal of public subsidy and state-funded licentiousness. As far as she was concerned the real public odium of state subsidy was that it encouraged permissiveness and the promiscuity of profuse breeding among the dirt poor.
For a moment it seemed to have worked. Many voluntarily returned to work and the economy began to assume a competitive edge which was lacking during the labour years of “Sunny Jim” Callaghan. After an epic face off with the labour union which ended in humiliation for organized labour, the economy took a further shot in the arm as a resurgent middle class rallied to Thatcher’s neo-con social engineering.
In a moment of triumphalist hubris, Margaret famously let it be known that there was no such thing as society, only individuals. It was an extreme formulation of neo-con ideology and right-wing Political Darwinism. Despite stiff opposition from left-leaning ideologues in her own party who Thatcher routinely dismissed “as wets who are not one of us”, the lady with the deadly handbag went ahead to slam an unpopular and divisive poll tax on the nation.
For many in her party and the country at large, Thatcher had bent the stick of societal harmony too far in the other direction and it was time to seek the consensual middle ground and golden mean. It was time for Thatcherism and Reaganism, its American mutant cousin, to go. In retrospect, the tame and temperate regimes of John Major and Bush the elder in Britain and America respectively were nothing but stop-gap measures and holding devices before the advent of a hugely modernized Labour Party under Tony Blair and a renascent Democratic Party powered into office by the charismatic William J. Clinton.
Thatcher’s seemingly casual and flippant observation is indeed a Freudian slip. In its pristine state, the neo-con society reminds one of a Darwinian state of nature, a war of all against all which emphasizes casual brutality and the survival of the fittest. Anybody who has a glimpse of this state of nature or who has watched Nature Geographic Wild and had seen animals pounce and predate on each other must have a fair sense of the sadistic prototype of the human society as envisioned by certain right-wing fascist ideologies.
Yet even in this animal society, some animals are simply more animal than other animals. Natural predators are born not bred. A wild horse cannot become a lion. The killer instinct is wired into the DNA of certain animals. They are genetically conditioned to go for the jugular while their herbivorous victims, however big and massive, could only offer futile, defensive kicks. Scientists applaud this as nature’s way of maintaining balance in the eco system. Are we also saying that the savagery inherent in political Darwinism is a way of maintaining balance in human ecology?
The point is that human society is not an animal kingdom. As humanity evolved away from the state of nature which closely approximates the animal order, society developed certain mechanisms for protecting the weak and for ameliorating the conditions of the desperately needy. This is the essence of human civilization and what distinguishes it from the animal kingdom and its cutthroat savagery.
While one can understand frustrations with those who contribute nothing to the society and are seen as a clog in the wheel of human progress, the neo-liberal argument for a kinder and more inclusive society is compelling. All people are born equal but they are not equally endowed. Even in the same nuclear family there is usually a divergence among progenies. If it were possible to gather all human resources together and redistribute them among human societies and their denizens, the usual laggards and no-hopers will soon re-emerge among new billionaires just as prosperous societies will re-emerge among the poverty-stricken hellholes of the world.
What should now concern Africans in general and Nigerians in particular is how to develop indigenous knowledge-systems which will cure the continent of its colonial trauma and power the rapid development of politically stable and prosperous African societies. The debate in the wake of Trump’s triumph shows how the current plight of the continent owes a lot to ethnically polarized and mutually unintelligible enclaves and an absence of reasoned engagement with western orthodoxies.
It is time to begin to look beyond competing western ideologies that have served their respective societies well. But for the purposes of international interaction, Donald Trump is the least of our problems in Nigeria and Africa. Except what we are witnessing in the west presages a fundamental epistemological rupture which will lead to the birth of new societies after much tumult and chaos, it should be clear that western societies have learnt how to take care of the aberrant outgrowths of liberal democracies.
We must now begin to tell ourselves some home truths. Both Liberal Welfarism and neo-con Darwinism are competing and countervailing state models developed in the west as a result of their internal history. They are organic derivatives of centuries long struggle which witnessed revolutions and momentous bloodbath. They cannot be applied to African societies wholesale and without significant modifications and respect for the internal history and constitutive logic of colonial nations. While there will be points of convergence, there will also be points of critical divergence and incompatibility.
In all modern non-western societies that have bucked the trend of underdevelopment and declining national relevance, there is always the presence of a serious, focused and committed nationalist intelligentsia. China’s combination of authoritarian politics with economic liberalisation, Japan’s transformation of its Samurai ethos and bee-like cohesion and discipline for rapid growth, the Singaporean model of political repression and developmental acceleration, the Brazilian brand of economic populism and political elitism, the modernization of feudal honour in Dubai and the combination of dynastic but dynamic caste politics and rapid innovation in India and some of the Asian tigers, have all been powered by innovative and inventive indigenous knowledge production.
Fifty six years after independence, Nigeria is yet to have an organic and durable political structure, not to talk of a viable economic blueprint for rapid development and accelerated growth despite the country’s prodigious natural resources and intellectual endowments. Almost two years into General Buhari’s tenure the country is still busy trying to apprehend elusive executive, legislative, judicial and bureaucratic thieves. Surely, there must be some fundamental things we are not getting right. And surely, it has nothing to do with the emergence of Donald Trump or the stunning defeat of Hillary Clinton for that matter.
