Why There Can Be No "Conservative" Administrative State

Much of our current politics appears to be shaped by ideology when it is in reality shaped by the demands of the technological system. In this system, there can be no "conservatism."

The logo of the former Progressive Conservative Party of Canada

98. Why There Can Be No "Conservative" Administrative State

All political ideas, the stuff of ideology, of the think tanks and the policy makers which happen within the context of the administrative era are political ideas which happen within the context of the administrative state era. This means that they are defined by the technology that is the administrative state. Another way of saying this is that all policy is policy. Those who have read me for some time know that I hold to Marshall McLuhan’s maxim that “the medium is the message.” What this means is that the most important content of any media is the medium itself. The medium of the television is more important in terms of its effects on you than any one television show that you watch. The impact of the technology of the automobile on your life and on society is more important than any one trip that you or anyone else might take in a car. The medium of Twitter is more important than any one tweet that you might send. The impact and effects of the medium of the administrative state on society matters more than any one particular policy that may be enacted through it. All laws are laws and all policies are policies.

These mediums, these technologies, tend to operate in the background and we rarely think about them. People are more inclined, when standing around the water cooler — assuming the technology of the water cooler still has a significant impact on the life of an office — ask about whether or not you watched the big game or the new episode of everyone’s new favourite show. It is unlikely that you will hear someone inquire, “How did your use of the television affect your life this weekend?” Instead of asking about the trip we took to the beach on the holiday weekend, it is unlikely that they will probe us with questions such as, “Tell me, how did the use of the automobile influence you over the weekend?” You get the idea. Thus, in politics we are much more inclined to argue like we do over television — was Friends, Seinfeld, The Office or Big Bang Theory the better show? — which party has the better set of policies rather than the merits of the mechanism of the administrative state itself. We just assume that because these policies are from “our guy” that they must be somehow different and “better” than those of our opponent. And perhaps they are, in the way that watching Little House on the Prairie is morally better than watching Debbie Does Dallas. But you still must understand that in watching, regardless of which you choose, you are still a couch potato with a three second attention span. All television shows are, in the end, television shows. So what does the technology of the administrative state do? What are its effects?

In order to unpack this properly, we need to develop a rudimentary understanding of what life was like before the administrative state. We need to grasp what a truly “conservative” disposition might be. I am of the mind that the terms “conservative” and “liberal” are largely meaningless these days, especially once you understand that progressive liberalism is a mechanism used to “conserve” the power of the current ruling class. In this regard, I don’t use “conservative” to mean “preserving an older form of liberalism.” I am not looking to go “return” to the 1990’s, the 1950’s or even the 1770’s. Because of the nature of the technological society, we passed a tipping point along the way after which everything is shaped by the progressive nature of this society, including its institutions of governance. Prior to this inflection, much of the way that society was governed was through tradition and custom.

What does this mean? Custom and tradition are the unspoken ways of doing things that govern the day to day lives of people on the ground. They are the “way we doing things around here.” They are composed of stories, practices, morals, rules, customs, some of which persist even though the original reason for the practices have long since passed. As you grow up, you listen to the stories you are told by parents, family and community when your behaviours are out of line. Many of them have grown up over hundreds of years, perhaps longer. It is a stable order that has persisted over time. The basic social rules, the way of the world around you, has persisted and was largely the same for your great grandfather and it will be the same for your great grandson.

Because these customs are held in memory, there is a limit to the number and complexity of the rules within this social system, if someone were to take the time to sit down and enumerate them all and commit them to writing. And so, you will have a few principles that get applied in the moment to new situations. Perhaps a new situation will require a new solution. The community would likely then band together, the wisest offering input and then either a consensus would be reached or someone like the chief would make a decision and something new would be added to the collective memory. If significant enough, it might become a new story that then helps explain to future generations why they do this thing, or if a similar situation cropped up, the story and memory would guide future generations in their actions. Often these behaviours were shaped over time and modified and refined such that they become trusted by the people, reliable plans of action that have worked for time immemorial. Even if it was only one or two generations, they become part of “the way we have always done it.”

There is a stability to this over time. When written laws come into play in this regard, they do not need a long written case history that can be referenced. Memory and wisdom, the judgement of the elder, judge or ruler comes into play making a ruling based on some combination of the written law, convention or the memory of how it is generally understood and the uniqueness of the situation. There might be stories that surround the application of this law in the past. Some might even be written and recorded. But the decisive thing in the moment is the coming together of what is written, the past memory of the people and the personal wisdom, the judgement of the person or persons tasked with making a decision in the moment. There are always edge cases and unique situations that test traditions and customs, but these can usually be resolved by the use of sound judgement.

So what happened? There was cultural shift in modernity that began to look at these customs and traditions with suspicion in contrast to both reason and the emerging scientific method. The idea was basically this, that we should take these older traditions that have ordered society and test them against reason and with scientific rigor. These traditions were looked upon as constraining, narrow minded and prejudiced. They limited the pursuit of knowledge in society. There began a long process of examination in which the fundamental traditions and customs of people, their prejudices, were abstracted, rationalized and then supposedly tested by science and reason. Alongside of this there was a belief that we could draw “principles” from history that would allow us to solve many of the problems previous societies faced in governance.

The American Constitution was developed in this context. A group of men in a room who believed that they had reasoned out of history a series of principles that would then limit the power of government and preserve the liberty of the people. Because they are abstracting principles they believed to be operative down through history, they are able to think of it as being rooted in history, when in fact it represents a decisive break with the idea of customary law. Thus, everything today now has to be demonstrated by reason, that it conforms to some universal principle or that its “objectively” bad for society. You are no longer simply allowed to say, “Sorry, that is not how we do things around here. Its not happening,” and this should be sufficient justification and obvious to everyone.

Wade Stotts

put out an excellent video related to my topic here as I was getting ready to write it, illustrating how this shift between custom and tradition to that of reason and science works itself out in the American context today.

This transition to reason and science, as instantiated in the technology of the administrative state is fundamentally away from a conservative society that is based primarily in the social memory of a people, their stories, customs and traditions, supported by a written corpus of laws and religious texts primarily, to one that is primarily abstract and rational, that exists almost fully within the written codices of law and policy, supported by scientific study and research and instantiated in institutions. Rather than arising organically from within the people and their shared communal life, it is now imposed upon people from the outside by means of the system. It must be justified by outside sources that are considered rational or scientific. Your own judgement is permitted in fewer and fewer situations.

Before we proceed to discuss how this expresses itself in the technology of the administrative state, it is useful for us to briefly pause and meditate on the notion of biblical law. I can hear people arguing that God’s law is imposed from the outside by God. This is true. But in the formation of the old covenant, the formalization of God’s relationship with his people, and in the formation of the new covenant in Christ, both are beginnings. At the beginning, God says you will do things my way because I am your God and I am the one who saved you and made you into my people. So, you will live the way that I tell you to live. In the New Testament it is very explicit that we are commanded to make disciples.

“Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit” Matthew 28:19

The discipleship process is one of active instruction in which the new believer is taught how to believe, think, act and behave as a Christian. In a sense, discipleship is a crash course, a kind of ongoing boot camp, that the believer goes through until the ways of being a Christian are so interiorized that functionally it is like they have always been a Christian. They now share in our stories, customs and traditions. They are one of us. The faith and the Way of life that it births are now second nature to them. They can be trusted to say, “this is how we doing things around here.” The thing that separates us from other boot camp type enculturation processes, is that this whole process is aided and directed by the Spirit of God. The ways of God in Christ are taught to you by men and by God himself, writing them on your heart and in your mind so that you have no need for the written law.

“But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. Against such things there is no law. Those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires. Since we live by the Spirit, let us keep in step with the Spirit.” Galatians 5:22-25

This was always the intent of the old Mosaic covenant.

“I will give them singleness of heart and action, so that they will always fear me and that all will then go well for them and for their children after them. I will make an everlasting covenant with them: I will never stop doing good to them, and I will inspire them to fear me, so that they will never turn away from me.” Jeremiah 32:39-40

And:

“I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you; I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh. And I will put my Spirit in you and move you to follow my decrees and be careful to keep my laws.” Ezekiel 36:26-27

And while it is true that these are both considered messianic prophecies that point to the new covenant in Christ, they reveal the intent of God for his people. You can see this in the way that Deuteronomy casts the relationship between parent and child as one that resembles what we might thing of today as “discipleship.”

“The Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength. These commandments that I give you today are to be on your hearts. Impress them on your children. Talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up.” Deuteronomy 6:4-7

This would explain why Jesus is so hard on the Pharisees for all of the extra rules and regulations that they added to the law as a way to protect the integrity of the law. By placing so much emphasis on getting the externalities of the law right, making sure to put into writing what to do in every possible conceivable situation, they were instituting a kind of early form of rationalized, managerial faith. Jesus taught us that the teachings of God and his ways should so live within us that it really doesn’t need to be written down anymore. This is the core of the work of the Spirit of God. This is what discipleship is really all about.

And this brings us to the point of the administrative state and why all policy is policy and there is no such thing as “conservative” policies.

It is possible to govern large groups of people, empires even, based on custom and tradition. They function very differently and they are limited in terms of scale and consistency. Basically what happens is you as a king put someone in charge of a certain area of responsibility or a certain district. You as a the king might have certain broad things you want done. You need to squash the bandits in the Dark Forest. The tax revenues have slumped over the last few years. I need you to understand why this is happening and get these revenues back up to what they have normally done. This person is put in charge. He arrives on the scene and he decides how he wants things done. If he is smart, he will take time to listen to advisors and get the lay of the land in terms of the various customs and the way things work on the ground. He might have to push against some of these, but he will know what he is working with and against. He will have his own way of doing things. He will decide what records he wants kept and how he wants them to be kept. And as long as he produces results within the broad instructions of the king, he basically does things his own way. If he fails, it is disastrous for him and the fortunes of his family. If he succeeds, the rewards can be great in terms of prestige, title and wealth. But when his term is up and the new guy is installed, he might keep some of the things of his predecessor, but chances are likely that he is going to come in and do things his way. This also meant a great variance in the quality of leadership over time and in different places.

With technical administration, by instituting standards in terms of record keeping and policy over time that endures from administration to administration, you create a high degree of consistency across the governmental system in terms of outcomes over time that are largely person invariant. The role of the administrative leader is no longer to impose their own way onto the system but to manage the system as it exists. The person becomes subordinate to the system itself. Yes the system can be redesigned and tweaked, but it is usually to raise the bar in terms of the quality and consistency of outcomes. If you want better outcomes, you improve the system. The people are largely irrelevant. You can pretty much swap them in and out at will and things hum along as usual. They become “fungible cogs in the machine.”

The power of this system is that it allows you to govern with much greater consistency over time and space, ensuring that governance is more or less the same wherever you might access government services. Additionally, you are looking to eliminate the lows in the system, allowing it to function at a consistently high level everywhere and at different times. While you might lose the lows, one of the costs of this is that it also stifles top end excellence, making those persons limit and conform themselves to a policy regime that keeps them running at an average to slightly above average level.

This briefly describes the system. To what end is it being put? Here is the thing. The administrative system is the main vehicle for the abstraction and rationalization process that we talked about earlier in relationship to customary law. We live in a world where there are problems. So, what happens is that these problems are examined, abstracted from their original context, subjected to a rigorous process of rational and scientific examination and a solution is then proposed to “fix” the problem. Sometimes the problem are the very customs and prejudices of society. Everything must be subjected to rational and scientific examination. And then various systems need to be put in place to “solve” the problems identified by reason and science. You are not merely looking to competently manage certain shared concerns of the community like maintaining defense, ensuring the roads are maintained and the trash is picked up. There is this definite idea that if we can properly apply reason and science to society we can “fix” it and “solve” all of the persistent problems we as a people face.

It might begin with something as simple as, “Good citizens, in order for them to fully participate in both the democratic and economic life of this nation, need to be properly educated.” The problem is inadequate education. So certain standards need to be implemented. Then we need to develop teaching methods so as to ensure a consistent level of education for all students. Next you notice that some poor students come to school with lunches deemed inadequate, or non-existent. So we need a school lunch program. Perhaps a breakfast program. And if you replicate this across dozens of perceived problems across society, the institutional and policy regime grows with it. Much of this architecture of policy and organization grows so as to support and maintain an industrial economy. But the system itself, the technology of the administrative state, is developed and put in place to solve perceived social problems at scale. It is a mechanism of social engineering and social management.

In this regard, there is, built into the system itself, a utopian impulse, that explicitly says that we are no longer bound by the customs or beliefs of our ancestors. We will examine every social convention, all morality, each social process and then reengineer them for a modern industrial, scientific, technological society. We can, through the application of science and reason, perfect society. There is a quality of a generative, iterative, system that is constantly looking to improve its systems towards the end of creating the perfect set of policy proscriptions. A policy is developed and implemented. We look at the downstream effects of it being put into place. We examine the problems and the successes and then go back to the drawing board to improve the policies and the delivery systems. Once the changes and “improvements” are implemented, you then let them play out once more and begin the process of improvement all over again.

These rational, scientific, technical state or state-adjacent apparatuses govern just about everything today, from early childhood education, to foreign policy, to monetary policy, to health policy, to banking policy, to tax policy, to policing policy, to policies for fairness and equality, to policies that end discrimination, to tariff policy. Everything has a set of policies designed to manage the system towards the best outcomes for society. Within this grand system of policies, certain policies get labeled as “liberal policies” and certain policies get labeled as “conservative policies.” But both sets of policies have the same goal in mind and that is managing the system so as to produce the best results for society, however that is defined. And all of these policies are imposed onto society through incentives, regulations, government agencies, criminal law and so forth. None of them emerge organically as a set of customs and traditions that got worked out over time within a particular social context. And, if a functioning organic community seems to be producing results, guaranteed someone will swoop in and analyze what they are doing so as to develop a system to “replicate” it elsewhere. But they can’t, not without the generations of traditions that developed organically. You end up with a simulacrum of a real community.

I mean, you could try to technologize the Christian faith and impose it through government policies and systems that mimic the discipleship process through a series of initiatives, incentives, punishments and so forth. You might achieve a simulacrum of an organic Christian community, but it will not be a real thing, and in so doing, by technologizing it, you will inevitably create problems as well as positive outcomes due to the four laws of technological ambivalence laid out by Ellul in The Technological Bluff.

“First, all technological progress has its price.

Second, at each stage it raises more and greater problems than it solves.

Third, its harmful effects are inseparable from its beneficial effects.

Fourth, it has a great number of unforeseen effects.”

This is why, in our previous piece, Ellul argues that embracing the use of propaganda, itself a technology that embraces the move to abstract and rationalize and technologize the processes of communication and persuasion, to advance the interests of the church and the Christian faith, end up turning the faith into a simulacrum of the faith. This is why you can’t instrumentalize and turn Christianity into an administrative system. Its also what happens to the culture and society more generally: it becomes a simulacrum of an organic society that functions by means of custom and tradition.

We could spend a lot of time trying to pin down the inflection point where one passes from a traditional society based on custom and tradition to one in which everything has been rationalized and intrumentalized and put into a form usable to the technical administrative system. My thought is that these organic traditions and customs persist longer than people think and are still operative even today in pockets here and there in our society. They don’t entirely disappear. Your office might develop a culture of its own that exists in parallel with the set of stated administrative principles under which it is supposed to be operating. Sports teams, for example, can develop a “team culture.” You can see this in small towns in some places. Churches often have this kind of organic culture. It does exist. That said, I would argue that the inflection point is reached much earlier than people think. You can see elements of the kind of thinking that dominates the administrative state in the Napoleonic era with his reforms of government record keeping and administration, the efforts at standardization. We can see it in the American Constitution.

Once you cross over the inflection point, much of what then happens in society through its formal systems of government are dictated by the nature of the system itself. You cease to broadly question the system and all problems essentially become technical problems that get solved through some application of technique and technical systems. Nobody ever questions whether or not we should have the system. There are some pure anarchists or libertarians who would ditch the whole state apparatus writ large, but for the most part, we except the system as the system. And so the ground of the battlefield is now determined for us. This is why, as Wade Stotts noted in the video above, we cannot just simply say, “We don’t do Hindu temples here.” We have to have reasons that satisfy the demands of rationality, scientific rigor or universality in order to forbid something. It must be scientifically demonstrated that Hindu temples are bad for society before you can forbid them.

And so we must debate monetary policy, trade policy, industrial policy, tariff policies and so forth. But we never actually question whether or not we should have an industrial society. Do you have a single payer health care system or a for profit system? You never really question the need to have a health care system. On and on we could go like this, but the essential point here is that almost the entirety of the questions over which we debate in the public realm are questions set and determined for us by the idea that all problems must be managed through some set of rational policies implemented through some institution or another. All of these policies are geared towards “solving” some problem or another that society has. In this regard, you have more or less accepted the premise that we can solve the problems we face as human beings through the technology of the policy and the administrative apparatus. This is an inherently progressive and utopian project. All policy platforms that operate within this system, that try to move this system towards ends that are purported to be “conservative” or “liberal” are in reality some version of progressive managerialism. Within the terms set by modern managerial governance there can be no “conservatism.” You are merely trying to implement a different progressive vision.

You can argue that you are drawing on “conservative principles.” But if there is such a thing, it exists in the living cultural memory of a people as their customs and traditions. Once you abstract them out of their living context, rationalize them and turn them into a set of policy proscriptions that can then be implemented and enforced through the mechanism of the administrative state, you have technologized what was once a living thing. It is a simulacrum of a living and conservative society. It can be argued that this simulacrum of a living conservative society might be better than the one that the sexual revolutionaries want to impose, but you must be honest with yourself, that you no longer have a conservative society. You have just deemed that the imposed simulacrum of a conservative society is better than the one that sexual revolutionaries want to impose. You are still a couch potato with a three second attention span who has decided that watching the simulacrum of a wholesome prairie life is better than watching porn. As long as you accept the system and want its benefits, you have to accept that with it comes certain ills or problems. One such problem is that all politics are now progressive utopian politics. You are defined by the system, the game, that you have set up for yourself. Every policy that you put forward in this system is a policy that is geared to improving the system or fixing the system. The system is fundamentally progressive at its core. This is why all politics within this system are progressive. They are “conservative progressives” or “progressive progressives.” Or maybe, like they are in Canada, they are “Progressive Conservatives.”

This is why it seems like all the major political parties look very much the same and the differences between them always seem to be on the margins. They all draw from the pool of experts, who themselves operate within the broader system of technique and technical management. This is also why they are able to pivot suddenly on issues so seamlessly, as for example they did during Covid, when early on lockdowns and shutting down the borders were seen to be anti-Chinese racism. Mere weeks later the borders were closed and we were locked indoors. This is also a danger for the so-called dissident online right, that so much time is spent trying to get policy ideas that are presently outside of mainstream expert discourse into the consciousness of the people. If you are successful, it is likely that today’s leftist progressive will suddenly be spouting your policy ideas as things that must be done citing things like “the latest research” or some such.

The system itself runs on policy proposals. Just like everyone wants to produce the next hit show, so too everyone wants the next hit policy. And if your radical obscure film festival concept production gets seen by the right studio executive, they have no qualms ripping you off or buying you out to create the next big hit production. It will likely be lame and corporate, but it will be your idea squeezed through the studio process. It works the same with political policy. If your ideas can help keep the experts and their political backers in power, they will not hesitate to rip you off. The power interests that back political parties want their interests put forward. This is why a Mark Zuckerberg can wake up one day and be a Republican backer. This is also why major political shifts can happen within a party. If a new set of policies are deemed better for the backers, the shift will be made. The major political parties differ, if they meaningfully differ at all, it is between cautious progressivism and more radical progressivism. But all parties affirm the policy based technical administrative system. This is why, ultimately, the idea of defeating left wing progressivism within our current system of governance and social organization will likely not result in much difference to your life overall.

Even flips as large as moving from open borders to closed borders are still both policy proposals and in the end they are both progressive policy proposals because they are both geared toward brining about a certain vision of a better future within the technological system. All it will take is “new research indicates” and they will be off an running. This is why Mark Carney could make an effective political campaign out of stealing all of the policy proposals of the Conservative Party, leaving them holding an empty bag. A similar thing happened in Denmark in regards to immigration, effectively neutering right wing parties. All of this is happening with a system of governance that sets the parameters: all solutions to society’s problems can and will be solved by means of technical policy proposals that can be enacted through state institutions or those institutions that embrace the same or similar policies. In this way, all major business institutions, non-profits and so forth, effectively become an arm of the state, through the universal application of policy based solutions. The only real ideology is the belief in technical management. It is the only solution that is permitted. All policy is policy.