You might have seen the picture above. It’s the Tacoma Narrows bridge which collapsed a few weeks after being built. Why? Well what you can see here is the perturbations from the wind being amplified by the suspension system on the bridge - in the way that feedback amplifies what quite modest sounds from a mic held too close to a speaker. But people had been building suspension bridges for more than a century when this bridge was designed. Surely they knew a thing or two about this? Turns out they did and you can read about that here. In short, the problem had been solved. And solved so well that it could be forgotten about. And so it was. So what other problems do we create by simply forgetting in this way? Maybe most of our most important problems. As the great Alfred North Whitehead put it “Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them.” As I’ve argued before, I think that, least in hindsight, Hayek’s liberalism represents a similar kind of forgetting. With all those community bonds that held society together being in rude health (OK I exaggerate but only to gratuitously weaken my case), they could safely be ignored. But hindsight has proven him wrong. And if you pay proper attention you can see there were some at the time who thought he was wrong. Indeed a trio of founding members of Hayek’s Mont Pèlerin Society thought he was wrong and said so at the time. They were Michael Polanyi, Bertrand de Jouvenel and Raymond Aron. As Raymond Aron put it in 1961 in reviewing Hayek’s 1960 Constitution of Liberty, Hayek’s philosophy presumed the existence of society into which would somehow be constitutionally entrenched all kinds of constraints on government in the name of property.

In order to leave to each a private sphere of decision and choice, it is still necessary that all or most want to live together and recognize the same system of ideas as true, the same formula of legitimacy as valid. Before society can be free, it must be.

So what else might we be assuming? With these things very much on my mind I came across this passage from Eric Schliesser on another great liberal, albeit a less Hobbesian one than Hayek. John Dewey:

So, for Dewey, conceptually a state originates in a public. But interestingly enough, once a state is established, the original public may disappear. In fact, if a state is successful in managing the public effects of private transactions, it’s quite possible that these effects become invisible to ordinary agents and bystanders. So, the public and (as Dewey notes) society become a victim of their own success in outsourcing to the state the managing of social problems; and these may wither away as the state is successful in coordinating and regulating social consequences. This is, in fact, Dewey’s error theory of the rise of what he calls ‘individualism.’

And the more I think about it, the more I see the whole structure of our politics completely dominated by thinking which is oppositional from the ground up. There are two things that need to happen in successful political communication. You need cooperative understanding - you need to understand each other and understand something about what might bring about agreement between those who think about an issue a little differently. And you may also need a ‘competitive’ dimension in which arguments are tested out - and votes are taken. But here’s the thing, building government around elections makes pretty much everything a function of that latter - competitive - dimension. Pretty much everything in politics becomes legible as an issue as people arrange themselves into ‘for’ and ‘against’ camps and compete for our allegiance. So I’ve started to wonder whether the very habits of mind by which we understand politics - the way in which things are framed by overarching left and right narratives (though more recently the right name for this is culture war), might not be ‘natural’ but might, instead reflect the whole way politics is constructed. As you probably know, the terms left and right emerged in the French Revolution. They emerged that is the moment popular elections became the fulcrum of national politics.