Technology and Liberty

Robert Harris is the author of Fatherland, probably the most successful alternative (or "counterfactual" as it is called these days) history novel ever. He writes occasionally, and well, for the Daily Telegraph. This column contains two interesting points. First:

Every commentator on this conflict - and I write as one who supports it - seems to have got it wrong. What's frightening isn't the prospect of the Americans becoming bogged down, as in Vietnam; what's frightening is the almost contemptuous ease with which they are winning it.

True, so far. The technological gap has increased so far that this war is the equivalent of those colonial wars where Western troops brushed aside their primitive foes. Of course, we should always remember that incompetence (Little Big Horn), bureaucracy (Isandhlwana) and overconfidence (Gordon in the Sudan) can close that technological gap pretty dem quickly. Reporters who were schooled in Vietnam remember the human elements well but forget the technological gap. This war is to Vietnam what the Second Afghan War was to the First. Let's hope that our leaders are as competent as "Bobs" was.

I am, however, worried by Harris' predictions of technological totalitarianism. The US has maintained its constitutional protections such that it has working safeguards against such an eventuality. The British have acquiesced in the evisceration of their constitution so that the only way to overturn such a regime is by revolution: either peaceful (the election of a truly libertarian-oriented government) or through concerted civil disobedience (which I sincerely hope it never has to come down to).

I find it interesting that once again, it is the gun enthusiasts in the States who are most aware of the last time anything like this happened. Don B. Kates, in his useful book Armed, co-written with Gary Kleck, quotes Edward Gibbon (I Decline and Fall, p. 53), writing about the Roman monarchy, but obviously thinking of his own time:

Unless public liberty is protected by intrepid and vigilant guardians, the authority of so formidable a magistrate will soon degenerate into despotism ... A martial nobility and stubborn commons, possessed of arms, tenacious of property, and collected into constitutional assemblies, form the only balance capable of preserving a free constitution against enterprises of an aspiring prince.

By nobility, Gibbons of course meant local bigwigs rather than Earls per se. The UK no longer has such a body of men, prepared to stand up for their local neighbours. The new nobility is merely a Court Party, a gang of super-rich bohemians who control the commanding heights of the media and legal establishments. The commons is not so much stubborn as disengaged, demoralised by the trashing of their values by that new nobility in the culture wars. Property rights have been quietly done away with, and their assemblies destroyed. Arms? Ha! Is it any wonder that Tony Blair's position is so strong?