Somehow the confluence of my pleasure reading seems to bear directly on events that we explore repeatedly in international politics. Recently, I have read two books that portray Western attitudes about corruption, lack of transparency, election abuses, and the relationships between politicians and their consituencies. I am not going to do a full book review here–just a few quotes from two Fictional Works. One great aspect of fiction, or course, is that it attaches to no one in particular and allows us to explore issues on a personal level without making accusations. Another aspect of looking at fiction: it deals with universals, or at least, what we Westerners culturally assume is universal.
One of the books: All the King's Men (1946) by Robert Penn Warren. This is a fairly standard text in the U.S. educational canon, and I think it sums up many of the cultural assumptions we have about corruption in government. Though Warren continued to deny it, this novel had many parallels to the lives of the populist and corrupt Huey and Russell Long of Louisiana. The second is Henry Fielding's Jonathan Wild (1743), about the “Thief-taker General of Great Britain and Ireland” and was actually a roman-a-clef about Walpole's government from 1721-1742. A brief biography of Walpole notes that he served six months for corruption in government and then resumed his government service as First Lord of the Treasury and Chancellor of the Exchequer. Stuff like that, uh, never happens now.
All the King's Men:
Warren wrote that the politician he wished to portray in an early (dramatic) version of All the King's Men would be a man::
whose personal motivation had been, in one sense, idealistic, who in many ways was to serve the cause of social betterment, but who was corrupted by power, even by power exercised against corruption. That is, his means defile his ends. But more than that, he was to be a man whose power was based on the fact that somehow he could vicariously fulfill some secret needs of the people about him.” . . . .
According to Warren's conception, the fulfillment of these secret needs ultimately cause the dehumanization and alienation of that leader from the people and from himself as well. In short, he was planning to write about a Greek tragic hero of a 20th century type and link it to some of the problems with democratization itself: that leaders who tap into that secret need can be popularly elected and maintain power, even when it is not in the best interest of the electorate to do so. In the last chapter (Chapter 10), the protagonist Willie Stark has been assassinated, and his wife, who presumably should know him without the political aura, gives an epitaph of sorts: “He was a great man . . . . . I have to believe that.”
Jonathan Wild
In Jonathan Wild, Fielding the idea of a leader's greatness is the subject of pitiless probe. First, the use of a master criminal as a stand-in for a Prime Minister takes one right to the bottom line. Wild's historical racket was to engage thieves to steal, and then go to the victims of the theft to secure a reward for the return of property–or to blackmail the victims further if he managed to obtain compromising material. Likewise, his thieves had to jump to his tune–he would be quite ready to turn them into the magistrates if they took too large a cut of the ill-gotten gains. This ability to work the system from all angles Fielding called Greatness:
. . . it is necessary that all great and surprising events, the designs of which are laid, conducted and brought to perfection by the utmost force of hman invention and art, should be produced by great and eminent men. . .
. . . .we often find such a mixture of good and evil in the same character that it may require a very accurate judgement and a very elaborate enquiry to determine on which side the balance turns. . . the greater number are of the mixt kind . . . their greatest virtues being obscured and allayed by their vices, and those again softened and coloured over by their virtues.
Later in Book One, Wild elucidates his idea, which sounds not too different than forming a political party or coalition:
What then have I to do in the pursuit of greatness but to procure a gang and make the use of this gang centre in myself?
So, what do they say about Western norms?
These two different works, one supposedly non-political and one heavy satire, say a lot about a conception of democracy and governance. In Fielding's time, government did not supply many social services; income equality would have been a laughable concept; government served the needs of a few. Slightly over 100 years after Walpole's government, Sir Robert Peel argued for criminal consolidation so that punishment would be in proportion to the crime committed, and rule of law could be developed more fully. One agent of this change, directly relates to Fielding's work: a free press. Fielding could write about crime and government as similar enterprises without fear of charges or reprisals from great men.
Second, distrust of government and of its leaders does not always lead to reform. For some reason, this always shocks us when looking at the “other”, but we frequently fail to note instances of it in our own histories. Warren had originally chosen to make the leader the tragic hero, but in a sense, the collective electorate also has an equally fatal flaw, in that they support a leader who has lost the compulsion to serve them well.
In democracies, people believe in spin. we want to have our age defined and what Warren terms “secret needs” fulfilled. Therefore, democratization does not always produce the best choice; democracy also gives an opportunity to make a poor choice. An electorate may let stated issues lie because unstated ones are more powerful.
As voters and yes, as leaders, we have to surmount our own prejudices and complacencies in order to get the best government available. At the same time, we should not find it incomprehensible that states beside our own have problematic leaders, even when these leaders evince competence or even greatness. I sometimes think we have to concentrate more upon those mediums of oversight that eventually bring corrupt governments down, rather than specific leaders: election protocols, media freedoms, and rule of law. That way, when any electorate is ready to insist upon better governance, they will have the tools to achieve it.
