Agent Running in the Field by John le Carré
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The Camel’s-Back Syndrome

Democracy is inherently amoral; certainly more so than dictatorships which tend to have rigid codes of behaviour and predictable (if often unpleasant) relationships. Nothing about a democratic society is stable or reliable. That’s it’s hidden cost, which from time to time unhides itself in phenomena like Trump and Brexit. The Catholic Church recognised this explicitly in a string of 19th century encyclicals that have never been taken off the books. Agent Running in the Field is a sort of summary of why the Church takes such a dim view of democracy.

First, in a democratic society it is presumed that everyone has his or her own interests which one has the right, no the duty, to pursue. Of course this includes members of government and civil servants, even though no one likes to speak of this. The consequence is corruption as an ideal. If you’re not in it for gain, you’re really not a player.

Second, the inherent re-valuation of values that goes on constantly within a democracy implies an absence of ethical foundations. A society that believes it is charge of its own morals can end up with some very strange behaviour and even stranger leadership. And without some form of externally confirmed criteria, there is nothing to constrain the idiocy of the worst among us.

Finally, democratic societies cannot learn - largely because no one can agree by what standard to judge that to be learned. Every person has his own interpretation. So technological knowledge can be accumulated; but moral knowledge cannot in a democracy. History has no real meaning to those who believe they can reinvent themselves to suit the demands of the day. The present is always exceptional; tradition is always archaic. Continuity is demonstrated only on the discontinuous action and counter-action of alternating governments and fluctuating electoral demands. Consequently democracies don’t adapt, they merely find new ways to repeat the same mistakes.

Le Carré as usual tells a good story - all the pieces neatly laid out and wrapped up nicely in the end. Well nearly so. It’s clear in this one that he’s having some reservations about which gangland boss, Putin or Trump, is more representative of democratic government. I think he might be leaning toward the view of the Catholic Church when one of his characters points out the problem of the “camel’s-back syndrome, when the things you’re not allowed to talk about suddenly outweigh the things that you are, and you go down temporarily under the strain?” ‘Temporarily’ may be an optimistic assessment. The Holy Roman Empire, perhaps, wasn’t so bad.

Postscript 17December19: I just ran across this in my notes from Richard Hofstader’s 1963 Anti-Intellectualism in American Life , which more concisely captures my intention in the above comments (See https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

“One reason why the political intelligence of our time is so incredulous and uncomprehending in the presence of the right-wing mind is that it does not reckon fully with the essentially theological concern that underlies right-wing views of the world. Characteristically, the political intelligence, if it is to operate at all as a kind of civic force rather than as a mere set of maneuvers to advance this or that special interest, must have its own way of handling the facts of life and of forming strategies. It accepts conflict as a central and enduring reality and understands human society as a form of equipoise based upon the continuing process of compromise. It shuns ultimate showdowns and looks upon the ideal of total partisan victory as unattainable, as merely another variety of threat to the kind of balance with which it is familiar. It is sensitive to nuances and sees things in degrees. It is essentially relativist and skeptical, but at the same time circumspect and humane.
The fundamentalist mind will have nothing to do with all this; it is essentially Manichean; it looks upon the world as an arena for conflict between absolute good and absolute evil, and accordingly it scorns compromises (who would compromise with Satan?) and can tolerate no ambiguities. It cannot find serious importance in what it believes to be trifling degrees of difference: liberals support measures that are for all practical purposes socialistic, and socialism is nothing more than a variant of Communism which, as everyone knows, is atheism.”

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