Free-will and good governance

Politics as the art of the possible

by Kumar David-January 17, 2016,
10:58 am
"I am Zarathustra the godless;
where do I find my equal? All who
give themselves Will and renounce
Submission, they are mine".
- Friedrich Nietzsche in "Thus Spoke
Zarathustra"
It is in the nature of things that people curse their government, sometimes
justly at other times with no thought for the art of the possible. One could
say this of ordinary life too; parents desire impossible achievements from
their progeny, fans demand Bradmanesque feats from mere Smiths and
Sangas, and your salary never matches your true worth, eh? Two samples
in the current political universe spring to mind: Is Obama a miserable
failure? Is the government of Lanka falling short of reasonable
expectations? I will explore both and reach opposite conclusions, but a few
paragraphs on free-will may be useful as a primer. I can only touch on the
topic but I take the chance name a dazzling array of people;
knowledgeable readers may like to expand on what they said on the
subject.
Two great religions (Christianity and Islam) are deficient in their depth of
treatment of the free-will theme due to their peremptory accent on "Thou
shalt" injunctions; a third is plain wrong in its caste-cursed Bhagavad Gita;
introverted Buddhism is not much use in this discourse either. But other
traditions have transcended these limitations and explored the art of the
possible. Zarathustra, Socrates, Heraclitus the foggy (grandfather of the
dialectic), then through Hamlet and the European Enlightenment to
Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche. It is an issue seminal to materialist
philosophy but Marx was dead when Nietzsche published. Whats the
bottom line? Stated blandly and banally, as befits an intellectual mediocrity

of my calibre, its about what is possible and not possible in given

circumstances.
Chronologically, first comes Zarathustra (Zoroaster to Westerners) whose
dates are uncertain, somewhere between 900BC and 1200BC; modern
scholarship places him contemporaneous or before the Rig Veda reflecting
themes and thoughts of a pastoral people his Gathas and Yasna
Haptanghaisti. He lived in north-eastern Persia or just beyond; perhaps in
ancient Bactria between the Hindu Kush and the Amur Darya. What is
important for this essay is his discourse on the struggle between good and
evil which Nietzsche twisted (Thus Spoke Zarathustra) into the notion that
free-will is only recognition of necessity, hence the will is the genuine
fountain of the true.
Is Ranils reluctance to expedite the journey of the Rajapaksas to a wellearned sojourn in the lock-up or a merited trip to the gallows a recognition
of the limitations of the possible in the current conjuncture; an intelligent
acknowledgement of the doable? Nietzsche it is said glorified the will but
thats wrong. He recognised the inevitability of the practical. So how do we
separate the undoable from the weak-kneed? Are Ranils choices
erroneous, do his circumstances differ from the constraints that cripple
Obama? But before I dwell on that I grant that, of course, at times will
can be wrong. Napoleon is credited with saying "The word impossible is
found only in the dictionary of fools"; but wasnt it folly to march the Grand
Army all the way to Moscow to be snuffed out in the Russian winter?
Western philosophy
and free will
Socrates gave it a very Socratic twist. With him the moral aspect takes
precedence; he identified virtue with knowledge and held that it is
impossible to deliberately do what one perceives to be wrong. Hence
the good is identical with the true and imposes itself on the will and
the intellect. Remember his question "What is courage?" His disciples said
"bravery", "fearlessness", "heroism" etc. "No" said the old sage, "Courage
is presence of mind". Were Zarathustra, Socrates and Nietzsche
converging? And what else could Marx have meant: "Men make their own
history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under
circumstances they choose, but under circumstances existing, given and

transmitted from the past".

Christian philosophy from the time of Aquinas, of Aristotelian predilection,
diverged sharply from this. Aristotle held that vice is voluntary and
Aquinas that man can freely choose and that the ability of the intellect to
conceive the universal is the root of freedom. Jesuits desperately wish to
reconcile free-will with the providence of god, but how can this be done
without infringing mans freedom? Their answer springs from the writings
of Luis de Molina which in my view fail, but to explore that will take us too
far afield. Anyway the simple gospel answer bypasses these disputations:
"Jesus said: I am the resurrection and the life; he that believeth in me
though he were dead yet shall he live" - John 11:25.
Obama denied free-will
The defining characteristic of the Obama presidency is the absence of freewill; the President cannot turn this way or that; he is barricaded on all
sides. Neither healthcare, nor budget, nor trade deals, nor global treaties,
nor defusing the mad gun lobby, nothing can he do without encountering
visceral hatred from a slice of the people and a Republican controlled
Congress (now both houses). The loony fringe, red-necks, the rich and the
white evangelical middle-classes hate this black intellectual Hamlet of a
president. Never before has US politics been so divisive, hate filled and
partisan. That Obama cant get much done at root is not the lack of will
but the presence of leg-irons and handcuffs. Meaning, even if he were
strong willed he will be obstructed at every turn.
He is "the most powerful man on earth", they say, but he bereft of free-will
and a victim of circumstances. Some Americans in their political dotage
hanker after a president like themselves; coarse, semi-educated and
intolerant. The Donald Trump surge is no mishap; it exemplifies a part of
the nation. The point of this outpouring is not to harangue America and its
people but to drive home that this piece is about freedom and choice - or
the absence of it even in the domain of presidents and kings. This is true
even if you dislike Obama and think him feeble and ineffective risk taker.
Whatever the personality of the incumbent, a president in such
circumstances is crippled.
Ranil sans political-will

Are the circumstances constraining decision making comparable here in

Lanka? We should focus on Prime Minister Ranil, he is the source of power;
the president is comparatively ineffective and in any case suffers from split
loyalties between government and an SLFP suspended in semi-oppositional
jelly. Let us grant that the PM is the source of power and calls the shots;
then responsibility for the principal acts of commission and omission must
accrue to him. Responsibility for continuing widespread use of torture by
the military however is a crime for which both must be held responsible.
We now broach the question of free-will versus necessity. To what extent is
the failure to go after the rogues and killers of the last decade justifiable
as impractical and undoable? The rump of the old regime will agitate and
destabilise society, create havoc in parliament and the government will fall,
the Rajapaksas hold the race card in reserve, biding their time for when
the new constitution is floated or the "hybrid mechanism" initiated. For
these reasons, apologists argue, it is best to let sleeping dogs lie.
Abstract discourse about the political-will, necessity and constraints on
free-will get us nowhere. Answers lie in judgements pertaining to the
concrete conjuncture - Lenin was exemplar par excellence. Whats your
judgement on this governments diffidence? Mine is that the supposed
constraints are overblown; firm action can be taken without fear; crooks
and murders can be prosecuted; racism should be confronted earlier, not
later. Procrastination is storing up trouble, not easing it. This is
diametrically at variance with the picture I painted of the predicament of
the Obama Administration. Its a judgment and mine contradicts that of
the UNP high command. Where it sees danger I see opportunity missed;
where it sees a need to go easy I see diluted political-will. Worst, the
government will, in time, be compelled by challenges hurled at it by the
very forces it so fears, to take precisely the hard actions I am canvassing.
By then it would have lost valuable time; not fatal but hardly good reason
for procrastinating.
Ranil and the exercise
of free-will
In another dimension however the Prime Minister has exercised his freewill; acts of commission and omission in the economic domain. Think over
the policy spectrum of the last twelve months. What is striking is a policy

drive in the direction of trade and a lacuna in state-led developmental

activism. Sure, trade pacts with India, Pakistan, the US and the Asia Pacific
region are crucial; no nation can prosper or survive in this age without
integration into the global economy and an internationalist ethos. Thats
not my bone; my point is that the government is blind-sided on active,
interventionist, industrial, agricultural, services-oriented (except finance)
policy. It is also making a cardinal mistake in failing to nurture the informal
sector and in contemplating Megacity urbanisation without according this
sector a central role. The PM is indeed exercising his free-will in choosing
international trade and the private sector as his battering ram to drive
forward Lankas development, and he is exercising his free-will in
refraining from engagement in an activist production oriented policy drive.
This is not an accident; it derives from the PMs intellectual orientation,
quotidian mantras and ideological tastes. His thinking is: "Create
opportunities for private capital through trade, structural reform (curb
populism) and fiscal austerity. Private sector competitiveness is the engine
of growth. State led objectives are superfluous if not harmful". This is
different from Lee Kwan Yew, profoundly different from Deng Xiao Ping,
and today it is a far cry from how Modi is approaching development in
India. Will Harvards Development Centre lay out the framework for RW as
the Chicago Business School and Milton Freidman did for the killer Augusto
Pinochet or MITs "experts" lubricated a gigantic theft of state resources by
Russian oligarchs in Yeltsins first years? Or will RW swing to the centre
again under trade union pressure? The answer is flying in the wind.
I have been fussing, week after week, about invalid restraints on politicalwill in governance issues and inappropriate exercise of free-will in the
economic domain. Decision makers of course take no note of my scribbles
but I hope readers, who are more important in the long run, go along with
my way of thinking about governance and development.
Posted by Thavam