With more or less the entire Victorian corpus, modulo a bit of copyfraud, the Hari Seldon game is to enquire of this Library: which writers of the 19th would feel most justified, in their understanding of the eternal nature of history, humanity and government, by the events of the 20th? Whose crystal ball worked? Whose archived holograms delivered the news?
Broadly speaking, I think the answer is clear. Hari Seldon is Carlyle — the late Carlyle, of the Pamphlets. I consider myself a Carlylean pretty much the way a Marxist is a Marxist. There is simply no significant phenomenon of the 20th century not fully anticipated. Almost alone Carlyle predicts that the 20th will be a century of political chaos and mass murder, and he says not what but also why. And what a writer! Religions could easily be founded on the man — and perhaps should be.
But there’s no reason the Library need contain only one Seldon. Our mission today suggests a different candidate: another titan of Victorian letters, Sir Henry Maine. Here is history’s actual message on Climategate, delivered without benefit of Ouija: Maine’s Popular Government (1885). The Ouija board adds, Glenn Reynolds style: read the whole thing. It’s quite readable, especially if you can tolerate UR.
I will leave you with some samples. What is unique about Maine, even among his fellow Seldons, is that he is not just the greatest Victorian scholar of comparative government; he does not just correctly predict his future and our past; he also predicts our future. At least, in Maine you find many predictions which come true; few which come false; and a few which have not yet come.
First, watch him refine Austin’s understanding of aristocracy and democracy:
The most interesting, and on the whole the most successful, experiments in popular government, are those which have frankly recognised the difficulty under which it labours.
At the head of these we must place the virtually English discovery of government by Representation, which caused Parliamentary institutions to be preserved in these islands from the destruction which overtook them everywhere else, and to devolve as an inheritance upon the United States. Under this system, when it was in its prime, an electoral body, never in this country extraordinarily large, chose a number of persons to represent it in Parliament, leaving them unfettered by express instructions, but having with them at most a general understanding, that they would strive to give a particular direction to public policy.
The effect was to diminish the difficulties of popular government, in exact proportion to the diminution in the number of persons who had to decide public questions. But this famous system is evidently in decay, through the ascendency over it which is being gradually obtained by the vulgar assumption that great masses of men can directly decide all necessary questions for themselves.
The agency, by which the representative is sought to be turned into the mere mouthpiece of opinions collected in the locality which sent him to the House of Commons, is we need hardly say that which is generally supposed to have been introduced from the United States under the name of the Caucus, but which had very possibly a domestic exemplar in the ecclesiastical organisation of the Wesleyan Methodists.
The old Italian toxicologists are said to have always arranged their discoveries in a series of three terms — first the poison, next the antidote, thirdly the drug which neutralised the antidote. The antidote to the fundamental infirmities of democracy was Representation, but the drug which defeats it has now been found in the Caucus.
By “Caucus” Maine means, of course, the modern political party. Note his perfect description of the same paradox we see in Lippmann’s work — the spontaneous appearance of an antidote to democracy, often promoted under the very name of democracy itself. You knew, of course, that representative government was an antidote to democracy; you also knew that progressive scientocracy was an antidote to democracy; you never connected these two points. Or associated them with “the old Italian toxicologists.”
Note also that in 21st-century scientific bureaucracy, we have seen only two of these three steps. We have seen democracy and its antidote. The latter quite toxic itself, and growing only more so. We have not, however, seen the neutralizing drug — yet.
Here Maine explains his theory of aristocratic judgment:
Under all systems of government, under Monarchy, Aristocracy, and Democracy alike, it is a mere chance whether the individual called to the direction of public affairs will be qualified for the undertaking; but the chance of his competence, so far from being less under Aristocracy than under the other two systems, is distinctly greater. If the qualities proper for the conduct of government can be secured in a limited class or body of men, there is a strong probability that they will be transmitted to the corresponding class in the next generation, although no assertion be possible as to individuals.
Whether — and this is the last objection — the age of aristocracies be over, I cannot take upon myself to say. I have sometimes thought it one of the chief drawbacks on modern democracy that, while it gives birth to despotism with the greatest facility, it does not seem to be capable of producing aristocracy, though from that form of political and social ascendency all improvement has hitherto sprung.
But wait:
But some of the keenest observers of democratic society in our day do not share this opinion Noticing that the modern movement towards democracy is coupled with a movement towards scientific perfection, they appear to be persuaded that the world will some day fall under intellectual aristocracies.
Society is to become the Church of a sort of political Calvinism, in which the Elect are to be the men with exceptional brains, This seems to be the view suggested by French democratic society to M. Ernest Renan. Whether such an aristocracy, if it wielded all the power which the command of all scientific results placed in its hands, would be exactly beneficent may possibly be doubted.
Our exact problem in a nutshell — 125 years ago.
The faults to which the older privileged orders are liable are plain enough and at times very serious. They are in some characters idleness, luxuriousness, insolence, and frivolity; in others, and more particularly in our day, they are timidity, distrust of the permanence of anything ancient and great, and (what is worse) a belief that no reputation can be made by a member of an ancient and great institution except by helping to pull it down.
But assuming the utmost indulgence in these faults, I may be permitted to doubt whether mankind would derive unmixed advantage from putting in their place an ascetic aristocracy of men of science, with intellects perfected by unremitting exercise, absolutely confident in themselves and absolutely sure of their conclusions.
Yeah.
Maine misses one small point here: this “ascetic aristocracy” will degenerate in talents, as well as morals. One fact that rings loud and clear from the CRU emails is the basically second-rate nature of these bureaucratic pseudoscientists — not just evil, but also not that bright. Though still aristocrats of unremitting intellectual exercise, to be sure, next to the broad population. We can’t all be Feynman.
And finally — the future:
The question, however, will not long or deeply trouble those who, like me, have the strongest suspicion that, if there really arise a conflict between Democracy and Science, Democracy, which is already taking precautions against the enemy, will certainly win.
This is how bad Sir Henry Maine is. Not only does he tell us about the great battle at the end of time which will pit Democracy against Science, a conflict unthinkable to you and I until this freakish spirit chat with the ancestors, but now perfectly clear and clearly inevitable — but he has no dog in that fight. Bow to the ancestors! For lo, their greatness is palpable.
Frankly, I remain skeptical. In real life, Hari Seldon never gets it exactly right. Science has already proven far more durable than Maine imagined. Its destined foe, Democracy, has never been weaker or more contemptible. Still, if history shows us anything about the latter, it shows us that Democracy can lie dormant and apathetic and seemingly dead for decades, even centuries, then burst out again in volcanic explosions of frenzied mob energy, irrational, irresponsible and irresistible, driving God knows where in a river of heads on pikes.
Should we prefer this? Or the long grim gray decaying reign of Michael Mann, Climate Stalin? Democracy, infinitely stranger and more dangerous; Science, the frozen tyrant we now know. Dear reader, the ancestors have left this one to you.