Ill Fares the Land (20 page)

I suggested above that the provision of train service to remote districts makes social sense even if it is economically ‘inefficient’. But this, of course, begs an important question. What precisely constitutes efficiency and inefficiency in the provision of a public service? Cost is clearly one factor—we cannot simply print money to pay for all the public goods we desire. Even the most irenic social democrat must accept the need to make choices. But there is more than one kind of cost to be considered when deciding among competing priorities: there are opportunity costs too—the things we lose by making the wrong decision.

In the early 1960s, the British government adopted the recommendations of a committee chaired by Dr. Richard Beeching and closed down 34% of the country’s railway network—in the name of savings and efficiency. Forty years later we can assess the true price of this catastrophic decision: the environmental costs of building freeways and encouraging car usage; the harm done to thousands of towns and villages deprived of efficient links to each other and the rest of the country; the vast expense entailed in rebuilding, renovating or re-opening defunct lines and routes many decades later when their value was once again appreciated. So just how efficient were Dr. Beeching’s recommendations?

The only way to avoid such mistakes in the future is to re-think the criteria we employ to assess costs of all kinds: social, environmental, human, aesthetic and cultural as well as economic. This is where the example of public transportation in general and railroads in particular has something important to teach us. Public transport is not just another service, and trains are not just another way to convey people from point A to point B. Their emergence in the early-19th century coincided with the emergence of modern society and the service state; their respective fates are closely interwoven.

Ever since the invention of trains, travel has been the symbol and symptom of modernity: trains—along with bicycles, motorcycles, buses, cars and airplanes—have been invoked in art and commerce as proof of a society’s presence at the cutting edge. In most cases, however, the invocation of a particular form of transport as the emblem of novelty and contemporaneity was ephemeral. Bicycles were ‘new’ just once, in the 1890s. Motor bikes were ‘new’ in the 1920s, for Fascists and Bright Young Things (ever since they have been evocatively ‘retro’). Cars (like planes) were ‘new’ in the Edwardian decade and again, briefly, in the 1950s; since then they have stood for many things—reliability, prosperity, conspicuous consumption, freedom: but not ‘modernity’ per se.

Railways are different. Trains were already the symbol of modern life by the 1840s—hence their appeal to ‘modernist’ painters from Turner to Monet. They were still performing that role in the age of the great cross-country expresses of the 1890s. Electrified tube trains were the idols of modernist poets and graphic artists after 1900; nothing was more ultra-modern than the new, streamlined super-liners that graced the neo-expressionist posters of the 1930s. The Japanese Shinkansen and French TGV are the very icons of technological wizardry and high comfort at 190 mph today.

Trains, it would seem, are perennially contemporary—even if they slip from sight for a while: in this sense, any country without an efficient rail network is in crucial respects ‘backwards’. Much the same applies to railway stations. The gas ‘station’ [sic] of the early trunk road is an object of nostalgic affection when depicted or remembered today, but it has been serially replaced by functionally updated variations and its original form survives only in fond recall. Airports typically (and irritatingly) linger well past the onset of aesthetic or functional obsolescence; but no one would wish to preserve them for their own sake, much less suppose that an airport built in 1930 or even 1960 could be of use or interest today.

But railway stations built a century or even a century and a half ago—Paris’s Gare De l’Est (1852), Paddington Station, London (1854), Budapest’s Keleti pályaudvar (1884), Zurich’s Hauptbahnhof (1893)—not only inspire affection: they are aesthetically appealing and they
work
. More to the point, they work in the same way that they did when they were first built. This is a testament to the quality of their design and construction, of course; but it also speaks to their perennial relevance. They do not ‘date’.

Stations are not an adjunct to modern life, or part of it, or a by-product of it. Like the railway they punctuate, stations are integral to the modern world itself. The topography and daily life of cities from Milan to Mumbai would be unimaginably altered if their great railway termini suddenly disappeared. London would be unthinkable (and unlivable) without its Underground—which is why the humiliatingly unsuccessful attempts of the New Labour governments to privatize the Tube tell us so much about their attitude to the modern state at large. New York’s very lifeblood flows through its ramshackle but indispensable subway network.

We too readily assume that the defining feature of modernity is the individual: the non-reducible subject, the freestanding person, the unbound self, the un-beholden citizen. This unattached individual is favourably contrasted with the dependent and deferential subject of the pre-modern world. There is something to this account: ‘individualism’ may be the cant of our time but for good and ill it speaks to the connected isolation of the wireless age. However, what is truly distinctive about modern life is not the unattached individual. It is society. More precisely civil—or (as the 19th century had it) bourgeois—society.

Railways remain the necessary and natural accompaniment to the emergence of civil society. They are a collective project for individual benefit. They cannot exist without common accord and, in recent times, common expenditure: by design they offer a practical benefit to individual and collectivity alike. This is something neither the market nor globalization can accomplish—except by happy inadvertence. Railways were not always environmentally sensitive—though in overall pollution costs the steam engine did less harm than its internally-combusted competitor—but from their earliest days, they were and had to be socially responsive. That is one reason why they were not very profitable.

If we abandon the railways, or hand them over to the private sector and evade collective responsibility for their fate, we shall have lost a valuable practical asset whose replacement or recovery would be intolerably expensive. If we throw away the railway stations—as we began to do in the 1950s and ’60s, with the vandalous destruction of Euston Station, Gare Montparnasse and, above all, the great Pennsylvania Railroad Station in Manhattan—we shall be throwing away our memory of how to live the confident civic life. It is not by chance that Margaret Thatcher made a point of never travelling by train.

If we cannot see the case for expending our collective resources on trains, it will not just be because we have all joined gated communities and no longer need anything but private cars to move around between them. It will be because we have become gated individuals who do not know how to share public space to common advantage. The implications of such a loss would far transcend the decline or demise of one system of transport among others. It would mean we had done with modern life itself.

—KARL POPPER

 

 

 

 

T
he case for reviving the state does not rest uniquely upon its contributions to modern society as a collective project; there is a more urgent consideration. We have entered an age of fear. Insecurity is once again an active ingredient of political life in Western democracies. Insecurity born of terrorism, of course; but also, and more insidiously, fear of the uncontrollable speed of change, fear of the loss of employment, fear of losing ground to others in an increasingly unequal distribution of resources, fear of losing control of the circumstances and routines of our daily life. And, perhaps above all, fear that it is not just
we
who can no longer shape our lives but that those in authority have also lost control, to forces beyond their reach.

We in the West have lived through a long era of stability, cocooned in the illusion of indefinite economic improvement. But all that is now behind us. For the foreseeable future we shall be deeply economically insecure. We are assuredly less confident of our collective purposes, our environmental well-being, or our personal safety than at any time since World War II. We have no idea what sort of world our children will inherit, but we can no longer delude ourselves into supposing that it must resemble our own.

The best reason for hoping that we shall not recycle the errors of the 1930s is that we have been there before. However inadequately we recall the past, it is unlikely that we shall neglect
all
the lessons that it has taught. More plausibly, we shall make unprecedented mistakes of our own—with perverse political consequences. Indeed, it is probably good fortune rather than wise judgment that has preserved us from the latter so far. But we would be ill-advised to rest on such laurels.

In 2008, 43% of American voters favored the election of Sarah Palin to the Vice Presidency of the United States—a heart-beat away from what is still the most powerful political office in the world. Like Dutch demagogues playing on local fears of Muslim immigrants or French politicians exploiting anxieties over the dilution of French ‘identity’, Palin and her ilk can only benefit from rising confusion and anxiety in the face of apparently unmanageable change.

Familiarity reduces insecurity, so we feel more comfortable describing and combating the risks we think we understand: terrorists, immigrants, job loss or crime. But the true sources of insecurity in decades to come will be those that most of us cannot define: dramatic climate change and its social and environmental effects; imperial decline and its attendant ‘small wars’; collective political impotence in the face of distant upheavals with disruptive local impact. These are the threats that chauvinist politicians will be best placed to exploit, precisely because they lead so readily to anger and humiliation.

The more exposed the society, the weaker the state and the greater the misplaced faith in ‘the market’, the higher the likelihood of a political backlash. In former Communist countries, a generation has been raised to believe in the free market and the minimal state: not just as ends in themselves, but as the opposite of everything that was wrong with the old regime. Where ‘klepto-capitalism’ has succeeded corrupt socialist regimes with alarming transitional ease, surviving an age of unprecedented insecurity is likely to pose a difficult challenge to fragile democratic structures.

Young people in eastern Europe have been led to suppose that economic freedom and the interventionist state are mutually exclusive—a dogma they share with the American Republican Party. Ironically, this echoes the Communists’ own view of the matter: a retreat to authoritarianism may thus prove seductive in countries where that tradition retains considerable subterranean support.

North Americans and western Europeans fondly suppose that there is a necessary relationship between democracy, rights, liberalism and economic progress. But for most people, most of the time, the legitimacy and credibility of a political system rests not on liberal practices or democratic forms but upon order and predictability. A stable authoritarian regime is a lot more desirable for most of its citizens than a failed democratic state. Even justice probably counts for less than administrative competence and order in the streets. If we can have democracy, we will. But above all, we want to be safe. As global threats mount, so the attractions of order will only grow.

The implications for even the best-established democracies are significant. In the absence of strong institutions of communal trust, or reliable services furnished by a properly funded public sector, men and women will seek out private substitutes. Religion—as faith, community and doctrine—is likely to undergo a measure of revival even in the secular West. Outsiders, however defined, will be seen as threats, foes and challenges. As in the past, the promise of stability risks merging with the comforts of protection. Unless the Left has something better to offer, we should not be surprised to find voters responding to those holding out such promises.

We must revisit the ways in which our grandparents’ generation handled comparable challenges and threats. Social democracy in Europe, the New Deal and the Great Society here in the US, were explicit responses to them. Few in the West today can conceive of a complete breakdown of liberal institutions, an utter disintegration of the democratic consensus. But what we know of World War II—or the former Yugoslavia—illustrates the ease with which
any
society can descend into Hobbesian nightmares of unrestrained atrocity and violence. If we are going to build a better future, it must begin with a deeper appreciation of the ease with which even solidly-grounded liberal democracies can founder. To put the point quite bluntly, if social democracy has a future, it will be as a social democracy of fear.

Accordingly, the first task is to remind ourselves of the achievements of the 20th century, along with the likely consequences of a heedless rush to dismantle them. This may sound less exciting than planning great radical adventures for the future, and perhaps it is. But as the British political theorist John Dunn has wisely observed, the past is somewhat better lit than the future: we see it more clearly.

The Left has something to conserve. And why not? In one sense radicalism has always been about conserving valuable pasts. In October 1647, in the Putney Debates conducted at the height of the English Civil War, Colonel Thomas Rainsborough famously warned his interlocutors that: “[
t
]
he poorest he that is in England hath a life to live, as the greatest he . . . every man that is to live under a government ought first by his own consent to put himself under that government
. . .” Rainsborough was not pointing to some misty-eyed egalitarian future; he was invoking the widely held belief that the rights of Englishmen had been stolen and must be reclaimed.