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Rules, rulebreaking and collective responsibility

by Robert Teitelman | Published June 9, 2011 at 12:36 PM

In the Financial Times today, a former philosophy lecturer at Cambridge, Jamie Whyte, defends the sanctity of rules. Who can argue? Whyte, the author of a 2004 book called "Crimes Against Logic," which "exposes the bogus arguments" of politicians, priests and, yes, journalists, in this case focuses his ire on the mandarins, political and technocratic, of the European Union who violated the rules by bailing out Greece, Portugal and Ireland. He's also unhappy because the European Central Bank is accepting Greek government bonds as collateral even though they've been rescheduled and restructured -- this, he says, violates other rules. "Of course, they claim that by breaking the rules they are acting in the interests of the European people," he writes. "But such judgments ought to be irrelevant. We do not allow an ordinary citizen to decide when the laws against theft should apply to him and when, all things considered, it would be for the best if he stole someone's property. ... It is tempting for those who have attained eminence and power to believe they are a superior kind of person, unhindered by the intellectual and moral limits that make men get along better when they live under the rule of law. Rules are made to be broken; that seems to be the view of our anointed European leaders."

On the face of it, and despite a very broad brush, Whyte makes a case bordering on the obvious. Lying and the arbitrary transgression of rules and laws are not only morally wrong, but corrosive of democratic ties. Whyte's charge is common not only in Europe, but in the United States, where related arguments are regularly made: that high officials run roughshod over traditional practices and that different "rules" apply to those of great power and wealth than the rest of us. I have no idea of the letter of European law, but normally, at least in the U.S., such obvious violations would end up in court, which of course has been set up for that very reason. My sense here is that what Whyte suggests as clear, black and white markers are in fact considerably more ambiguous administrative guidelines or rules. Does that make a difference? Well, yes. Such ambiguities do not exist just to take bureaucrats off the hook, but to provide some flexibility in an extremely dynamic world and to reflect complex underlying conditions. In short, beyond the kind of widely agreed-upon moral laws -- murder, say, or theft -- political and administrative arrangements that are too rigidly written can, like a gold standard, squeeze the life from a nation or an economy. Whyte seems to want to group all rules under these black-and-white moral prescriptions.

Whyte also makes the distinction between the "anointed" few in power and the great mass of powerless individuals. But he seems to make no connection between the two. This too is common in the American debates over the bailouts, which focused on regulators and policy makers who were, in Whyte's description, magically anointed and thus not accountable to anyone. Indeed, if anything, the European situation, with its layers of national and EU bureaucracies, is more extreme than even the U.S. But even in Europe, democratic institutions appear to function. There are not only judicial options to rein in technocrats making these bailouts, but political ones as well. If the great mass of Europeans decided that bailing out Ireland, Greece and Portugal were terrible policies -- and elections in Germany have swung on those questions -- then they could vote the bums out (or vote for new bums who would appoint new technocrats). But in fact, Europe appears to be deeply divided on these questions. And why not? These are extremely thorny issues, involving real lives, complicated problems and, of course, looming over it all, the fate of the euro zone itself. A rigid adherence to these "rules" would essentially mean the end of the euro zone.

Whyte is using this logical reductionism to argue for a kind of European populism, with just a trace of libertarianism. "Unlike the kings of yore, modern politicians cannot toss you in prison on a whim," he says (well, maybe yes, maybe no). "But they can still impose debts on you. And, as with the kings of yore, their arbitrary powers are rarely used to benefit the little guy." Ah, so here we have it. Whyte might be OK with a little rulebreaking if it helped "the little guy," but since it doesn't, it's very bad. But even if he hadn't gone there, he's essentially arguing that there is no redress in a democratic state -- that democracy and the rule of law in Europe are essentially shams. In Whyte's world, rules are arbitrary, leaders are anointed, and the little people are oppressed. There is no collective responsibility or consensus for projects like, say, the European Union, or indeed, for the creation of the social welfare state or a consumer economy. They have all been imposed from above by "leaders who believe that the rules are made to be broken."

If only it were so simple. In both Europe and the U.S., anger over the financial crisis and the bailouts has increasingly broken down into camps engaged in fantasies of crime and punishment. But the problems of both Europe and the U.S. are profoundly collective ones. Yes, you can argue that the mandarins pulled the wool over our eyes. But that's belied by the fact that they were as surprised as anyone by the disaster. Yes, you can argue that the systemic complexity simply eludes the democratic masses and that decisions were made by technocrats in secret. But that's complicated by the fact that systemic complexity exposed technocrats as ignorant as any voter. All this is to state the obvious: We have a political problem that far outstrips our economic or administrative woes. We've lost faith in democracy on any number of fronts (beginning in the U.S. with the war on terror). Focused on punishment, intent on therapeutic catharsis and rejecting any sense of collective responsibility, we simplify and reduce our problems to matters of simple moral nostrums. Meanwhile, the difficult, ambiguous, complex problems that are well beyond a matter of rules fester and grow. - Robert Teitelman

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Tags: bailouts | Greece | Ireland | Jamie Whyte | Portugal

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