Manifestos – by which we are shortly to be seriously afflicted – are viewed with grave scepticism by mostly everyone except those who painstakingly compile them. Manifestos are seen as comprising a nauseating mixture of promises for which the resources do not exist to fulfil, promises which will be forgotten as soon as power is gained, promises which those who proclaim them have no intention of implementing and promises which changed circumstances will in any case prevent ever being carried out. In any case there is no manifesto that cannot be summed up in the phrase “a chicken in every pot, gold in every pocket, a skill in every hand, a rainbow in every future.”
I think myself that all efforts to define impressively tidy and comprehensive schemes in a very untidy world are profoundly misguided. The blueprint theory of politics, or indeed economics or business or anything else, makes no sense to me. Master plans as soon as they are announced, begin to be eroded by changing circumstances and rendered out of date by evolving time’s unforeseen imperatives. Such plans are soon worth less than the paper on which they were written. Recall what chaos theory tells us: the merest flap of a butterfly’s wing over the Amazon can cause a storm a few days later. The subtleties of nature, not to mention the imperfections of man, are many times greater than the rigidities and perfections of any master plan.
Every day that passes makes a master plan more of an abstraction which, if clung to, becomes increasingly useless and even dangerous.
Similarly, dependence on any abstract principle to guide policy is a deeply flawed way of going about managing the affairs of man. The truth is that all doctrinal formulae are dangerous. The insistent cry of “The solution of the market place” and the command “Privatise” are the same incantatory nonsense as the magic phrases “Planned economy” and “Nationalise!” used to be. Consider politics as you might consider cooking. A bad cook is not somebody who lacks a vision of cooking, or a set of core beliefs about cooking or a master plan of how to cook. A bad cook is just a cook who doesn’t know how to cook and steals a good lot of the ingredients anyway.
The best politicians are those who serve up ideas which function like hypotheses in science, in other words they are the best ideas currently available but must always be subject to testing and replacement by a better one. Thus judgements can and should be made continuously about the utility, value, effect, rightness or wrongness of the idea or proposal without any concern about whether or not it corresponds to a pre-existing abstract principle or preconceived master plan. Actions should test ideas not slavishly follow them. When something is wrong it is wrong because it is wrong and not because it is inconsistent with some preconceived plan. The distinction, and even the greatness, of democratic politics is to make the usual moral fault of inconsistency into something very like a virtue.
Judgement of a politician’s morality and success ought to be made, in George Orwell’s beautiful phrase, on the basis of how clean a smell he leaves behind. If our idea of a political hero should be that of a thinker who had a vision for his people, translated it into a detailed master blueprint, and then stuck to his stated principles through thick and thin, about the best example of such a political hero we will find is Adolf Hitler.
In our daily practical affairs no such condition of things called “truth” or “perfection” or “ideal” can possibly be attained. Therefore none should be proclaimed. The exercise of political power makes most sense when it simply aims at the cultivation of what the English political philosopher Michael Oakeshott termed the “peaceable decencies of conduct” between those who are to be governed. Is there the remotest possibility that any of the manifestos we will shortly be reading will be written in that conviction?
