A Dream of Wessex by Christopher Priest
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The Self-Defeating Politics of the Visionary

The ideal society is not an uncommon subject in Western discourse. Plato suggested what it might look like. The early Christians had a different version. Thomas More wrote about it in his Utopia in the 16th century. Marx sketched his dictatorship of the proletariat in the 19th. G.K. Chesterton and Hillaire Belloc proposed a sort of medieval paradise based on craft-guilds in the 20th.

All these ideal societies share a common problem: an inability to specify the political system necessary and sufficient first to achieve something approximating the ideal, and then to maintain it in operation. Such a system must be capable of reconciling potentially contrary personal interests into some sort of stable common interest. To date no one has been able to formulate even a theory of such politics, much less succeed in creating a society at any level that shows itself to function effectively.

A Dream of Wessex is a fictional case study of how the search for the ideal society ends up on the rocks. It might be possible, given unlimited resources and no social constraints, to get a small group, say a half dozen people, to converge on a society which ‘works’ for everyone in the group. In fact there are organisational theorists who have proposed methods and experimented with just this, and had some success in large organisations (See https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1...).

The political difficulty arises, however, precisely to the degree that a coherent view of a shared world is achieved by the participants. The creation of a stable politics within any group quickly, and understandably, becomes valued by the group. Therefore the established political process, no matter what it is, is considered as something to be protected. Any attempt to add another member to the group is considered, also understandably, as a threat to the political unity of the group. The group is politically stable but at the cost of its social isolation.

This process of political unification and subsequent isolation shows up in phenomena as diverse as the nationalistic disaster of Nazi Germany to the commercial failure of Xerox. To keep politics working, the political process excludes those whose inclusion would alter it. Trump and his Republican enablers have adopted this as their explicit strategy - by restricting immigration, voter intimidation, gerrymandering voting districts, and making unjustified claims of voter fraud.

The paradox, of course, is that the more politics is restricted, the more likely it will take unexpected directions. The abrupt dissolution of the Soviet Union, and the equally abrupt dissolution of Lehman Brothers are ultimately the consequence of restricting discussion, analysis, and judgment to some cadre of like-minded folk, who for reasons of self-interest, stupidity, or ill-will, desire to maintain the political status quo.

The recurrent theme of A Dream of Wessex is losing oneself in inner space, that is, in that idealised vision of some group which then becomes attached to that vision. Unnoticed by the participants, such a vision transforms itself from being a liberating view of political possibility to a suffocating prison of violently asserted self-interest. Such transformation is not incidental; it is an essential consequence of the way in which the shared vision was achieved in the first place. The national or corporate vision necessarily becomes “the ultimate escapist fantasy, a bolt-hole from reality.”

So beware the man or woman of vision. They are death to good politics, no matter what their vision.

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