Hugo Grotius and California Politics

Hugo Grotius was a 17th century philosopher (1583-1645) who helped develop the theory of natural law as well as the scribe who wrote one of the first books on international law. So how does he help us think about politics in California (and possibly on a larger stage)?

In De Jure belli ac pacis (1625) he wrote about the conditions of a bargain between two nations. He suggested that either everything was all right with the world (and so the agreement should stand) or things have changed (and so the agreement should be renegotiated). When you look at California politics the second condition seems to be present. There are at least two trends that would argue for that change. First, is the demographics of the state. During the last two decades of the 20th century we (Californians) imported more human beings than all of Europe. (Not entirely surprising since our economy is bigger than any of their countries) That leads to some interesting results - we are a very different place than when I grew up. We often trip over ourselves because of the range of backgrounds and languages that we have in the state - but the assumptions about how to make decisions and what decisions we should make may be altered by all those new people. Second trend is technology. Here California leads and follows. Over about the same time period as the first trend we have changed our economy so that computers, biotech, entertainment, foreign trade and professional services now are the ascendant parts of the economy. We have also changed how technology affects our lives. Admittedly a lot of countries or regions are ahead of us in some technologies - A good part of Asia is ahead of the entire US in broadband deployment. Other areas are ahead of us in deployment of newer cellular technologies (few other countries live with a couple of standards in place rather than one). And there are some omnious signs that the growth in new technologies are going to some other areas of the world.

But the deployment of communications technology - of blogs(of course first on the list), cell phones, text messaging, cable and the rapid deployment of biotech and nanotech -the possibilities here are vast - suggests that things are changing and will change more still. Ray Kurzweil, the gifted writer who brought us a series of interesting books on technology, has just published a weighty tome - Singularity - that argues that the speed at which technology has been deploying is in the process of changing basic conditions of life through the deployment of GNR (genetics, robotics and nanotech - this book has been reviewed elsewhere and is well worth reading and admittedly my summary is a gloss of the substance here).

So with all this good news, why are we stuck with grumpiness about our political system both in California and the US (I would also argue that the problem extends a lot of other places too - look at the election in Germany as but one example)? Some have argued like DeTocqueville did that in democratic systems we are unwilling as citizens to make the hard choices - we want all the goodies but do not want to pay for them. I think that is baloney.

More appropriately I think we come back to the kinds of choices that we are presented with. Our political system produces leaders whose incentive is to produce Cole Porter (or Amilcare Puviani - who wrote the Theory of Fiscal Illusion) like choices - Accentuate the positive, decentuate the negative (and recently don't look for Mister Inbetween). Politicians and their advisors ask us to make choices that they think will help them get reelected. They also assume a world that no longer is - while they use the new media - they seem to think that most people get their news from old media sources.

If we are empowered in the consumer marketplace, then at some point, we will no longer accept the old way of doing things in the political marketplace. That will lead to probably more substantive initiatives trying to define the constraints of the system (with a lot of gotcha ones thrown in by the politicians trying to make a point or a simple advantage). At the same time we will demand, as we have begun to demand in other areas, more real transparency in our leaders and in their decisions.