Two Cheers For Corruption?

What is Corruption? 
Corruption, I was once taught, is the the use of public office for private gain. It is allegedly illegal and immoral, besides being harmful to a nation's economy. But why, I've always asked, does it persist in most of the world for most of human civilization?

The most common answer is that corruption is akin to theft, and the reasons for corruption ultimately boil down to selfishness, greed and a host of other human vices. But if this tragic account of human nature holds any validity, we are all corrupt (or potentially corrupt), though lacking in the same opportunities to indulge in it. This line of reasoning may even cause some of us to pity ourselves: if only we had more opportunities to be corrupt, our natural vices would take care of the rest...

But this moral argument explains too much as well as too little. If everyone is equally corrupt in theory, nothing remains to be explained. In that case, cause and effect coincide: people are corrupt because they are innately so. This is a non-explanation.  Clearly, we must look for answers elsewhere.

An Alternative Hypothesis
Let me propose an hypothesis that runs counter to conventional wisdom: private gain is one of the chief purposes of holding public office. Shocked? I expect readers to be so. We are all so used to thinking about public office in the exalted terms of civics textbooks that we typically fail to understand that the "state" is not a mythical sea-monster, Leviathan. The state, instead, ought to be better understood as the sum of power relationships in society that are deemed legitimate in the eyes of the law. To the extent that a nation's laws buttress patriarchal authority within a family, the monarch-like rule of the father-husband is as much a part of the constitutional order of things as legislatures or courts. For our purposes, therefore, the classical liberal distinction between the public and private realms needs to be put aside.

Defining the state in this manner avoids reducing corruption to a simple matter of individual virtue and vice. We now see the state as embedded in society with its messy power equations ready to upset any technocrat's grand institutional designs. For no one is above board entirely, except, as the ancient Greeks and Romans believed, the mythical lawgiver in a society. The everyday reality of society is, then, a series of overlapping struggles for wealth, honor, and virtue. It is not only about the rich fighting the poor, but also rich women positioning themselves above their poorer counterparts. Insofar as the state endows laws and policies with an official sanctity, the overlapping struggles in a given moment influence the distribution of power and resources in the future. Victory in one sphere of struggle may be reinforced in others just as easily as they might be undercut in others. Public office is thus nothing more than a means to a pre-determined end.

However, the distribution of power in society varies across time and place. In pluralistic or "polyarchic" societies, the same elites do not win every battle. Instead, power is distributed widely across multiple nodes in society. Capturing power in one sphere of the state does not imply that the winner takes all. Winning the battle for gay rights does not necessarily mean you will also be able to raise taxes on the rich. The use of public office for private gain is rampant in such societies as are accusations of the same. Absolutely no one is above suspicion.  In "monoarchic" societies, however, this is not the case. Oligopolistic interests concentrate power in closed circles, and social policies and laws reflect these interests. Public interest ends up being defined by the ruling oligarchs of the day, and the few individual deviations from this definition of public interest is denounced vociferously and even criminalized.

The Curious Modernity of Corruption
Now, corruption is an interesting term. It simultaneously functions as a modern economic term as well as a term of moral opprobrium. The modernity of corruption is not unsurprising. Its origins lie in the rise of Protestantism in Europe, which saw, among its principal tasks, a vigorous attack on the corruption of the Catholic Church. In western Europe, the triumph of Protestantism is inseparable from the triumph of capitalism over the medieval church, the aristocracy, and the peasantry. Whether in Germany, the Low Countries or in England, the modern attack on corruption accompanied the ultimate victory of the bourgeoisie on the Continent. With imperialism, the Protestant ethic at the heart of capitalism came to assume a global form. On this view of global society, heathens in Asia, Africa, and the Americas were corrupt and depraved creatures in need of salvation. The Bible held the key to salvation as much as markets and the modern state did. Corruption was backward, pre-modern, medieval. Salvation lay in the modern doctrine of progress.

We may not be all Keynesians now, but we are possibly all Protestant capitalists now. Economics is the study of capitalist markets today. Political science concerns "governance" of these markets. Anthropology studies the primitive Other, whether in Papua New Guinea and Nebraska or in car factories in Detroit and Gurgaon. Philosophy is the logical apparatus that binds together the modern bourgeois disciplines. Taking a step back from the indoctrination that lies at the heart of the modern civilizing mission, we can appreciate how Euroamerican modernity, based on the triumph of the Protestant bourgeoisie over the old feudal order, involves a decisive shift towards the rule of a single class. Knowledge and the state reflect this concentration of power in the hands of the few.

Champions of Euroamerican modernity, however, exist in the non-West too. In societies as different as India and Egypt, the last eighteen months have seen strong movements led by the urban bourgeoisie to take over partial welfarist regimes and remake them in their own image. To label these movements "popular" and "national" uprisings is very much part of the game. Paid news and intellectuals have filled out newspapers and magazines with their rants against the corruption of the state. What we need is efficiency and transparency, they say, but what they do not say is that they want to redefine public interest vis-a-vis their own private interests. For this noble cause, it is not at all puzzling that new-age religious leaders and foreign-funded social entrepreneurs have joined hands. Neither is it puzzling that the proudly apolitical youth of Gurgaon and Cairo   have discovered the pleasures of collective effervescence in virtual worlds.

Monoarchy versus Polyarchy
Corruption, our new-age reformers tell us, is rife at the lower levels of the state, especially in the countryside.   By this, we must understand that the urban bourgeoisie in these postcolonial societies have little control over rural power dynamics. Particular ill-will has been directed in India, for example, against elected politicians in the government. They are not just corrupt, but criminals too. Instead of seeing these politicians as simply conduits or brokers in a larger con-game, they are being presented before us as the ringleaders. Of course, this is only to be expected when leading corporate houses fund the anti-corruption crusaders and award paid leave to their employees to facilitate protests. Tellingly, the corporate crusaders have offered an extra-constitutional solution in which they and those they handpick will have the power to override all elected and non-elected officialdom in the land. This is the ultimate prize: complete control of the state by a class in the ascendancy. Monoarchy, in short.

Needless to say, these designs have not been successful until date. Ultimately, their lack of success boils down to a single reason: the competition between the urban bourgeoisie and other sections of society in the domain of the state. In India, for instance, the upper-caste bourgeoisie are not so preponderant as to obliterate powerful rural and anti-capitalist interests. Multiple competing political interests acting in the name of "the people" and accusing each other of the worst possible crimes, thus remains the norm. Corruption is thriving, as it rightly should, in a polyarchic society in which the state becomes the site of myriad struggles for power and justice alike. The nature of modernity in these polyarchic societies refuses to be a mere replica of Euroamerican originals. Nor does a CCP-like party emerge to produce a prostrate public to do its bidding. The shift to a monoarchic social order remains a distant dream for our bourgeois reformers in the postcolony.

The battle is far from over yet. I fully expect the urban bourgeoisie to try harder next time, and co-opt a few farmers, barbers, and cooks to display their "democratic" commitments. I also expect them to work within the government to award bailouts to wealthy individuals and corporations rather than reserve them for "wasteful" social expenditures. Nonetheless, I am quite hopeful for the future. While capitalist interests may grow stronger, their social rivals are likely to match them blow for blow. Above all, one may repose faith in our common apathy and cynicism towards those who seek to reform us. What for, we ask, and how much is it worth to you? We can still see and point to the Emperor's nakedness in ways that our peers in the West have long lost. Two cheers for corruption, then? 

So What's Right About Rights???

In the past couple of days, a number of people have expressed surprise over my opposition to the North Atlantic liberal rhetoric of universal human rights, articulated forcefully in President Obama's recent townhall meeting in China. I regard this kind of rhetoric as typical of the kind of cultural hegemony exercised by North Atlantic liberals over contemporary thought. It unites, curiously enough, both the center and the right in the US. As such, the ideological justification for Obama's statements is identical to that used by his predecessor to invade Iraq and spread liberal democracy in the Middle East. Moreover, much of US political science "scholarship" (if that's the right word here!) seeks to defend precisely that ruling ideology and its hegemonic status in the realm of ideas. This post seeks to advance my own agenda to discredit this false doctrine at every opportunity, and to expose the conceit and stupidity that it cleverly conceals.

At the outset, however, let me put out two disclaimers. First, I don't wish to defend any vague culturalist notion of Asian values or African-ness to criticize the hegemonic discourse of rights. Second, although the moral reasoning and semantics at work in this global discourse are poorly worked out, I readily acknowledge that all proponents of universal human rights need not have sinister motives.

So what's right (or wrong) about rights then? The answer, I believe, lies in probing the origins of contemporary rights discourse in the social contract theories of early modern Europe, most notably those of Hobbes and Locke. These brilliant men, who lived in an age of social ferment and religious violence, sought to produce a secular justification for what has come to be known as the modern state. By doing so, they hoped that differences of opinion regarding religious doctrine, the causa prima of the wars of religion, could be reconciled under the paramountcy of a secular, impartial authority. To achieve this laudable goal, they produced a fictional narrative based on an Edenic state of nature, in which all men and women were endowed by God with perfect liberty or rights, so much so that they could freely impinge on each other's rights. It hardly needs pointing out that this rationalization of the Book of Genesis, particularly the Garden of Eden story, is only superficially secular since anything else couldn't have been acceptance then. At any rate, Hobbes and Locke reasoned that men and women sought to escape the primeval state of nature by giving up certain God-given rights to erect an authority above them and thus preserve security, order, and peace. Doing so entailed a Biblical-style covenant or a "social contract" in which the duties of the sovereign and the rights of subjects were clearly articulated. (To be fair, both Hobbes and Locke argued that, if the contract were ever broken by the sovereign, subjects could rightfully rebel and replace it with a new one after drawing up a new contract.)

As the secularization of Western society produced apace over the next couple of centuries, social contract theories lost their theological moorings and simply became liberal justifications for the status quo. By the early 19th century, one finds the greatest theorist of modern liberalism, John Stuart Mill, calling for the state to be a benevolent despotism to achieve the greatest good for the greatest number. Mill's state was no longer an impartial umpire, but a calculating maximizer of utility in society. There was no longer the theoretical possibility of rebelling and redrawing a contract in the manner suggested by Hobbes and Locke. Most ironically, therefore, the language of liberalism had come to serve the conservative status quo represented by the dominance of the state.

This ironic conservatism is particularly apparent when the language of rights came to be used as an excuse for imperialism, most notably by J.S. Mill himself. Those outside the North Atlantic world were treated as simply inferior on a scale of civilization, and thus, in need of emancipation externally. A number of scholars, most notably Uday Mehta and Jennifer Pitts, have called this phenomenon "imperial liberalism." Undoubtedly, these secularized "liberal" theories found eager takers among collaborators in colonized societies who saw them, for good reason too, as terrific opportunities for personal advancement and upward social mobility. Quite obviously, however, most of the world remained unconvinced about the liberalism of their colonizers who claimed to be defending their rights against Oriental and African despotisms. There is no "cultural" resistance here; globally, people just don't attribute good intentions to their oppressors! The grandiose talk of rights in the ex-colonial world is forever tainted for that reason. A very thin veil indeed to cloak the underlying will to power.

Today, we can justifiably ask whether a secular doctrine of rights makes any sense. Logically, it is "nonsense on stilts," in Bentham's words. How can I claim a priori to possess rights when, in fact, I am campaigning to incorporate those very rights for women, minorities, refugees or whichever oppressed/marginalized group into the law books? It makes no sense. Either I have the rights already or I wish to have them in future. Both cannot be simultaneously true. It doesn't take a genius to figure out that this logical confusion in today's rights discourse is due to the loss of its original theological underpinnings. As the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre puts it, "rights exist [a priori] as much as unicorns do."

But that is not all. There is an inherent conservatism in contemporary rights discourse, owing to its tendency to justify power and domination, which seeks to undermine the older, pre-modern sense of fighting for rights. In this sense, rights are things to be won after sustained struggles in a given society, and once they're won and enter the books of law, the state is then obliged to respect them. In other words, rights are always negotiated between the rulers and the ruled. The regime type doesn't matter. The competing pursuits of legitimacy and liberty are to be found universally. The origins of the state are irrelevant. No fictional or Biblical story is needed in the manner of Hobbes and Locke. In the most secular or worldly sense, every ruler, democratic, oligarchic or kingly, must negotiate the terms of his/its legitimate authority with his/its subjects. Constitutions and laws reflect the outcomes of those negotiations, though only the vigilance of subjects to keep the ruler to his/its word.

It follows, therefore, that insofar as there is no world state or global authority with which men and women can negotiate their liberties in exchange for legitimacy, the notion of universal rights is devoid of meaning. Therefore, to say, as Obama did, that the ideals of the American republic are in fact universal is a meaningless speech act whose illocutionary force is nonetheless likely to irk Chinese authorities. Perhaps that is only to be expected in the complicated real politik between the two largest global powers today. The Chinese tell the Americans to raise interest rates and be thrifty; the Americans tell the Chinese to stop fixing their currency exchange rates. The game goes on. And perhaps, so it should. But it should not be obscured by mindless talk about universal human rights and the like. Let's just cut the crap and be a bit clear-sighted, can we?

To sum up, the secularization of rights talk have stripped it of any logical sense today. Likewise, universal human rights, as represented in the UN Charter, are meaningless speech acts. The latent purpose of these pseudo-liberal speech acts is, however, often to produce post-hoc justifications of tyranny domestically or abroad. Modern imperialism essentially depends on such pseudo-liberal talk, and even though the age of empires is formally over, a kind of inertia leads the old mentalities and rhetoric to linger on past their expiry dates. The rhetoric of democratization in US policymaking and academic circles provides the finest example of this inertia. There is, however, a proper way to talk about rights in the past or present. That is, as concessions sought by subjects from the ruler/state in the form of laws. Social movements seeking the emancipation of subjugated or oppressed groups (the poor, women, sexual, cultural and religious minorities, etc) seek to do precisely that. These are quests for dignity that entail much struggle and heartbreak for the protagonists and their allies. To the extent that states or state-like authorities have existed throughout human history and look poised to continue, it is pointless to imagine otherwise. Rights do not, therefore, exist a priori or universally, but in specific contexts in which power is sought to be appropriated by ordinary men and women after protracted struggles, if necessary with the barrel of the gun.