From a recent article in Tablet Magazine about the phrase Whole of Society:
The term was popularized roughly a decade ago by the Obama administration, which liked that its bland, technocratic appearance could be used as cover to erect a mechanism for the government to control public life that can, at best, be called “Soviet-style.” Here’s the simplest definition: “Individuals, civil society and companies shape interactions in society, and their actions can harm or foster integrity in their communities. A whole-of-society approach asserts that as these actors interact with public officials and play a critical role in setting the public agenda and influencing public decisions, they also have a responsibility to promote public integrity.”
In other words, the government enacts policies and then “enlists” corporations, NGOs and even individual citizens to enforce them—creating a 360-degree police force made up of the companies you do business with, the civic organizations that you think make up your communal safety net, even your neighbors. What this looks like in practice is a small group of powerful people using public-private partnerships to silence the Constitution, censor ideas they don’t like, deny their opponents access to banking, credit, the internet, and other public accommodations in a process of continuous surveillance, constantly threatened cancellation, and social control.
I recently ran across an essay from 1913 on A City Built by Experts, by Frederick Howe, which prefigures the ‘Whole of Society’ thinking discussed in the Tablet article.
City planning is the art of building cities as men build homes, as engineers project railroad systems, as landscape artists lay out garden cities, as manufacturing corporations build factory towns like Gary, Indiana or Pullman, Illinois. City planning treats the city as a unit in an organic whole. It lays out the land on which the city is built as an individual plans a private estate. It locates public buildings so as to secure the highest architectural effects and anticipates the future with the farsightedness of an army commander, so as to secure the orderly harmonious and symmetrical development of the community.
City planning makes provisions for people as well as industry, coordinates play with work, beauty with utility. It lays out parks, boulevards, and playgrounds, and links up water, rail, and street traffic so as to reduce the waste production to a minimum.
In a big way, city planning is the first conscious recognition of the unity of society, It involves a socializing of art and beauty and control of the unconstrained license to the individual. It enlarges the power of the state to include the things men own as well as the men themselves and widens the idea of sovereignty so as to protect the community from him who abuses the rights of property, as it now protects the community from him who abuses his personal freedom.
City planning involves a new version of the city. It means a city built by experts in architecture, in landscape gardening, in engineering and housing; by students of health, sanitation, transportation, water, gas and electricity supply; by a new type of municipal official who visualizes the complex life of 1 million people as the builders of an earlier age visualized an individual home.
(Emphasis added. The essay is excerpted in Visions of Technology, edited by Richard Rhodes.)
Interesting that Howe claims for his approach the term ‘organic’, while totally eschewing the whole idea of the organic development of cities and institutions. Interesting also that Woodrow Wilson was elected for the first time in that same year of 1913, and that he also employed the phraseology of an organic whole in rejecting the idea of the separation of powers.
The “whole of society” concept is something that easily goes beyond authoritarianism and slides into totalitarianism: remember Mussolini’s dictum: ““Everything for the state, nothing outside the state, nothing above the state”…and also that German word Gleichschaltung.
The late George C. Scott, in Seeing Like a State, called this “high modernism.” Among his case studies is one about designed cities, like Brasilia. He shows the horrors that Howe’s vision led to.
D’oh!
James C. Scott.
Craig…I started Seeing Like a State…looked interesting, but got distracted. Anyone else read it?
It was popular among the “thinkers” of that time to say that the time of the individual is past.
Still hearing echos of that today.
This reminds me of “The Great Reset” which is just a souped-up version of a cabal which instead of secretly meeting in a volcano lair does so openly at an alpine resort. The only difficulty Kames Bond would have in infiltrating such a gathering would be in finding a place to park his private jet.
I will also point to Jonah Goldberg’s 2008 book “Liberal Fascism”
One of the most recent instances of this phenomena is the involvement of the feds in working with the social media platforms to censor “misinformation.” I doubt the government had to twist their arms much. In fact I bet the various agencies gave themselves gold stars for bureaucratic creativity in suppressing speech by making the process “voluntary” and protecting themselves from judicial review by undermining the issue of standing.
See also Molly Ball and her magic cabal
I’m a fan of “Seeing Like a State”. It’s a very perceptive look at how the limitations in the information available to decision makers make ultimately doomed programs appear attractive in prospect. The section on Prussian forest management is a particularly good warning about aggressively extrapolating the results of pilot studies. Short summary – Prussian state revenues were heavily dependent on timber sales from forests. A study showed clear cutting a forest and replanting it as a monoculture selected for timber only produced a large increase in yields, which the state then proceeded to rapidly replicate. Unfortunately the yield gain was only for the first generation planting, as the monoculture rapidly depleted the soil and production rapidly collapsed in succeeding generations, but that took a couple of decades to discover. Also lost in the transition was the value to local populations (unseen by the state) of game and other secondary resources in the old forest that no longer existed in the replanted.
As I think about the book again, you could do a similar analysis on the vulnerability of modern large-cap corporations to similar failures, as the pressure to produce competitive returns and increasingly narrow pipeline of managerial talent drives rapid adoption of various technologies and policies across entire industries that show an immediate return or conform to the latest managerial fad regardless of longer term risks (the widespread adoption of CRT-based HR policies or just-in-time inventory management would be an obvious topics for study). It’s quite possible that modern IT actually negates much of the societal advantages of competition by so rapidly spreading changes throughout the business world that they are never truly tested competitively beyond the time horizon of a year or two in a business world with much longer market cycles.
“Whole of society” and “whole of government” merely provides for a multitude of milquetoast votes to drown out the truly rational and truly creative voices.
Marching morons, indeed.
What Obama and his allies (Bill Ayres ?) have produced is classical Fascism. Only now, with Biden/Harris do we see the evolution into Nazi beliefs like Jew hatred. Wilson began the romance between the Democrats and Fascism. FDR carried on after the relief interval of the 1920s. The 1920s resembled the 1990s in innovation but were slimed as the Fascists took over after Hoover blew his chance. Coolidge saw 1929 coming but believed only the NY Governor had authority over the stock market. That Governor, of course, was FDR.
David, a few years ago I met up with Margaret “University Diaries” Soltan and Mr. UD, a political scientist at Maryland, this was during a swap meet in Rockville. Somehow “high modern authoritarianism” came up and he recommended Seeing Like a State, which I read and enjoyed. Complexity Confounds Coordination is my interpretation of the phenomenon. Let’s say that reality will get the better of ill-thought-out good intentions, all the time.
SK…I guess I need to finished reading the book.
See also Starvation and Centralization:
https://chicagoboyz.net/archives/68006.html
An explanation of the origin of the term Gleichschaltung which differs from the one in the link I included with the post:
“Gleichschaltung is a compound word that comes from the German words gleich (same) and schaltung (circuit) and was derived from an electrical engineering term meaning that all switches are put on the same circuit so that all can be activated by throwing a single master switch.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gleichschaltung
…rather vivid, don’t you think?
David Foster … as an EE, I find that intriguing.
And Mike K … consider that fascism and communism are not standalone models for dysfunctional societies, but instead are expressions of a more fundamental human impulse … the desire to rule others because one Knows Better™, to the point that one assumes opposition to their (self-)righteous rule is based in ignorance and/or evil … and that dissenters are untermenchen who deserve no respect for their lives and liberty because they are threats to “progress”.
Communism and fascism are derivatives of the model of the end-stage theocracy, where mere men assume they have the mind of God and with it, His plenary authority over even life and death. Communism and fascism simply skip the step of using the name of God to justify their tyranny.
Naybor’s Dull Razor: it’s not a good bet to attribute to villainy, what can be explained by self-righteous hubris.
Considering there are few competent people and an overabundance of incompetence In the human race, filled with fools, buffoons and morons, a system led by “experts” will inevitably lead to totalitarian.
@Naybor: Self-righteous hubris vs. villainy… my first inclination was to call that a distinction without a difference, but then I remembered that well-known C.S. Lewis quote about “omnipotent moral busybodies.”
There is a hell of a lot of human suffering caused by self-righteous hubris.
Socialism appeals to one’s inner control freak; a need for orderliness. While some sociopaths embrace it as a means to power, most citizens get on board from the viewpoint that government can make everything tidy.
Yeah? Now do zoning laws.
Occasional Commenter…”Socialism appeals to one’s inner control freak; a need for orderliness. While some sociopaths embrace it as a means to power, most citizens get on board from the viewpoint that government can make everything tidy.”
In my review of Francis Spufford’s book Red Plenty, I said: “The idea of centralized economic planning is a very seductive one. It just seems to *make sense* that such planning would lead to more efficiency, less waste, and certainly less unnecessary human suffering than an environment in which millions of decision-makers, many of them in competition with one another, are making their own separate and uncoordinated decisions, resulting in pointless product redundancy, economic cycles driving unemployment, and lots of other bad things.”
The book, which is about Soviet economic planning as seen by those on the front lines of that system, is a useful corrective to such views.
Johnny, those that society deems “experts” may be competent in a subject area, but they usually CAN’T know YOU well enough to be competent to do more than give you advice.
You are likely the most competent person around, when it comes to understanding what it takes for you to keep going and get ahead. But our society, for over a century, has discouraged exercising that competence, in favor of outsourcing our decision-making authority to the elite few who Know Better™ … the high priests of our end-stage theocracy who are the blind, leading the blinded.
https://thenayborhood.substack.com/p/cutting-to-the-chase