By Dee Smith, CEO
The 18th century European Enlightenment made the West quite distinct in terms of intellectual, social, economic forms, even WEIRD: Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic, as the phrase goes. In parts one and two of this series, I looked at how corruption in many non-Western societies has been structured by “social pyramids” that link the high and low of a specific social group in mutual obligations, including cooperation in securing political power in order to succeed economically. This structure I contrasted to that of the post-Enlightenment West, where corruption uses money to get political power. I then argued that Western rules-based social orders, which made it possible to separate corruption from the social pyramids, are breaking down. One way to look at the rise of identity politics in the West is as the re-emergence of kinship- and identity-based structures similar to those of societies structured by social pyramids. The implications of this for society and for the evolution of corruption will be substantial.
Nineteenth-century European and North American societies, as they industrialized and previously rural people were forced to compete for survival in fast-growing cities, came to depend on science, technology, and eventually modern education. These societies developed distinctive hierarchies to manage their growing complexity, increase productivity, and compete with rival societies. Complex hierarchical structures were very different from the old social-pyramid hierarchies, although the two long existed side-by-side and in some ways still do. One difference was that they required social mobility and the possibility of advancement by merit. Dynamic merit-based hierarchies gradually replaced the social-pyramid hierarchies and developed merit-based elites.
“Merit” was and is a social relation, changing over time according to social demand. Imperial China’s merit-based examination system for civil servants rewarded expertise in classics of Chinese literature, rather as Britain’s elite educations emphasized classical Greek and Latin. When social demand for very different kinds of merit strengthened, these systems had to adapt or die, particularly as societies like Japan and the newly unified Germany quickened their pace of industrialization, militarization and social engineering.
Merit-based modern societies create a particular kind of private anxiety in that the creation of open opportunities for personal advancement puts the burden of failure, as well as success, on the individual. The protectiveness of social pyramids, as well as of mass participation in collective religious rituals and a shared spiritual life, could not survive the rise of merit-based hierarchical societies. The old social pyramids had cared for the people within their structures through a sense and practice of reciprocal responsibility. Modern societies deracinated this—each person is on his or her own. Official, bureaucratic systems now “care” for those who, because of nature, nurture, or accident, cannot care for themselves. Everyone else is homo economicus.
“Economic man” and societies based on competition and maximal efficiency dominated the 20th century to such a degree that almost everything was seen to operate in terms of economic “laws.” Yet markets are human constructs, and we forget that at our peril. The disruptions and anger we see in societies today may be connected to this in more ways than one.
Market-based maximal efficiency undermines social structures in part because it directs capital to technologies that themselves lead, unpredictably, to social transformation. More than 80 percent of unemployment in manufacturing in the US in the last 2 decades is due to automation, not to offshoring (whatever politicians may say). With the rise of generative AI, we face a tsunami of unemployment, coming now for white-collar employees. As Yuval Noah Hariri has noted, we are living for the first time in history without any real idea at all of what jobs will look like in 10 years! What’s a young person—or anyone—to do? People feel profound uncertainty about change that does not seem to have an identifiable logic or purpose but is nonetheless pushed forward relentlessly by developments in technology, from dependence on cyber systems and their vulnerabilities, to bio-error and bio-terror, to generative AI and the possibilities of Artificial General Intelligence.
In such an environment, people long for connection to something meaningful and concrete. They long for stability. “I don’t even recognize my own country any more” is a phrase I have heard all over the world, in societies very distinct from one another. People thus seek kinship, identity, and affinity with others who share their culture, concerns, maladies, and even bloodlines. And if they do not have a community offline they will find one online, with results that, over the past decade, seem to have been more negative than positive.
It is possible that these changes represent not partial revolutions, as in 1848, nor even the kinds of anti-capitalist revolutions seen in the first half of the 20th century, which were also built around homo economicus. The changes to come may represent a more profound transmutation, into a system (or systems—the outcomes may be very different from place to place) whose nature we cannot, at present, see. If large numbers of people decide their future looks worse than their present—which many perceive as already worse than their past—they may decide that the systems and rule sets and leaders they have been living under are no longer serving their needs. That they are no longer fit for purpose.
And then what? Will we see the rise of a revised form of social pyramids with internal obligations, because people do not feel they can rely on government promises and systems, and do not like the isolation and radical uncertainty that modern life forces upon them? Will the nature of corruption in the West begin (again) to resemble that of the non-Western world? Or will we see something entirely new?