A natural order exists

Guest Columns by Sauvik Chakraverti,

The Newindpress on Sunday, 2007-2008

A natural order exists

There is a ‘natural order’ around us. This order is easily visible when we visit crowded commercial areas in densely populated cities. In Delhi’s Chandni Chowk, Bangalore’s Brigade Road, Tokyo’s Ginza, London’s Oxford Circus or Singapore’s Orchard Street the visitor does not find posses of armed policemen ‘maintaining order’. The order exists on its own. Homo Economicus is a ‘rule-following animal’. He obtains desired objects by following unwritten rules that have been learnt over generations. The study of these rules is the task of both the subject of Law as well as that of Economics. It is a tragedy that super-specialisation means there are very few who study both subjects today – as Adam Smith and scholars of his generation had done.

The fact that a natural order exists independent of any single human will is important for all governments to note, for it is evidence of a deeply ingrained commercial ‘culture’. Since culture is something that has evolved slowly over many generations without any government controlling it, as have language, money and morals, it is a towering achievement for any civilisation to be possessed of a deeply ingrained commercial culture. For this is the means by which savages have tamed their instinctual urges and submitted themselves to the rigorous discipline of obeying the ‘rules of the game’.

The natural order in a city is evidence of civilisation: trading with strangers and living among them is human action that lies ‘between instinct and reason’, as Hayek put it. It is evidence of a change in human nature, with the instinct to snatch being replaced by the ‘natural propensity to truck, barter and exchange’. Simultaneously, life in a small tribe of known faces, all following a common purpose, has made way for rugged individualism, following one’s own ends and purposes, serving strangers and being served by strangers in turn, while also being in ceaseless competition with them. No single will commands the order.

This natural order makes the task of government relatively simple. If, on the other hand, the natural affairs of men resulted in a war of each against all, as was Thomas Hobbes’ paranoia, the task of government would be impossible. The proper understanding and comprehension of this natural order, then, is the first task of government. A government that understands this order and supports it gets an ally.

Note that this natural order does not exist in Srinagar, Kashmir, where there are armed soldiers posted every five yards. What the ‘government’ is doing there is a question that needs to be asked. Ditto Baghdad. How do the citizens of Srinagar and Baghdad get their daily needs met? What about Kabul? Should we first set up a vibrant market-place in these cities or should we try and install a government first – and a ‘democratic’ one at that? There is an interesting account of a British colonial civil servant in Baluchistan who, when faced with two warring tribes in his district, got them to assemble in neutral territory and trade peaceably with each other. Such civil servants (who invoked the market) were infinitely wiser than the diplomats who conduct international affairs today with brute military might.

Good government is therefore based on the realisation that the society it seeks to serve is already a self-ordering one, possessed of ethics and rules that make a complex, competitive and impersonal market order possible. Through the market, every possible societal want is satisfied, almost entirely without recourse to either civil or criminal law. The market is the process by which humanity survives. A good government is one that preserves and protects the market order. A bad government operates as a predator on the market: it has the ‘evil eye’.

At this point, let us recall the title of John Locke’s famous work of 1690: Two Treatises on Civil Government. The term ‘civil government’ has many deep implications. The word ‘civil’ has its root in ‘civilisation’ and ‘civitas’ (which means ‘city’), and is related to ‘civility’, ‘civil service’, and ‘civil society’. In this path-breaking book, which laid the foundations of many free societies, including the USA, Locke says that:

‘‘Men being by nature all free, equal, and independent, no one can be put out of this estate, and subjected to the political power of another, without his own consent. The only way, whereby any one divests himself of his natural liberty, and puts on the bonds of civil society, is by agreeing with other men to join and unite into a community, for their comfortable, safe, and peaceable living one amongst another, in a secure enjoyment of their properties, and a greater security against any, that are not of it. When any number of men have so consented to make one community or government, they are thereby presently incorporated, and make one body politic.’’

In England in Locke’s day, the notion of a ‘body politic’ was old hat. Many English cities and towns had independent government then. The Corporation of London (the one square mile) was by then over 500 years old, possessed of strong, independent traditions. Because of these institutions of ‘civil government’, under the covers of feudalism, capitalism had long emerged: the East India Company was almost 100 years old when Locke wrote. London was the headquarters of capitalism then. The city was governed by ‘civilians’ (businessmen). No account of the ‘Westminster model of democracy’ is complete without an exposition of the robust ‘bourgeois’ institutions of urban local self-government upon which it is based.

It follows that India’s centralised, bureaucratised and socialist democracy can never deliver the ‘civil government’ John Locke wrote about. In India, the concept of ‘body politic’ does not exist, not even in Rae Bareilly or Amethi. We have what may best be called ‘party government’, and since party functionaries control the bureaucracy, these babus cannot be called ‘civil servants’: they are partisan, and their lamentable tendency is to prey on the market. And our political parties are themselves largely made up of criminals, not ‘civilians’. The socio-pathology of our political parties requires study.

I will, however, conclude on a note of hope: Our deeply ingrained commercial culture, and the natural order it brings about, is our greatest strength. The natural ‘rules of just conduct’ which we follow in the market must make up our basic law, immune to amendment by any legislature of any majority whatsoever. Indeed, our legislatures must be ‘bound by a law they did not legislate’: A Charter of Liberties. We must also see to the installation of powerful Mayors, each at the head of an honest ‘body politic’, to run cities and towns independent of higher authority. If we embrace free trade unilaterally, our poor people will gain irrespective of politics. In subsequent columns I will explore these issues further. Stay tuned.

The writer has authored Antidote: Essays Against the Socialist Indian State, and its sequel, Antidote 2: For Liberal