The Social Contract
What is government supposed to do for us? And is it doing its job?
First of all, what is a social contract?
In political philosophy a social contract is an agreement between the ruled and their rulers, defining the rights and duties of each.
In pre-historical times mankind lived a largely separate existence, or else formed small units and presumably sorted out social problems relatively simply by gathering together to discuss any problems, and come to some agreement on how matters should proceed.
When those groups became larger and formed into city states there were too many people to deal with matters by a gathering together of all the people concerned, and over time matters relating to the management of relations between individuals were given over either to a headman or a group of persons of manageable size who acted as representatives of the larger community.
From these beginnings grew the concept of kingship and government.
There have been several attempts to define and redefine how a social contract should usefully operate. These attempts go back to the time of the Greek city states. However, life has changed dramatically since those times, and maybe the old definitions have become out of date.
The next attempts at defining a social contract were made by the English philosophers Hobbes and Locke, and the French philosopher Jean-Jaques Rousseau. It is to be noted that times had changed considerably since the days of the Greek city state. It would therefore seem reasonable to expect the concepts to have changed to reflect the new conditions in the body politic.
Hobbes and Locke sought to justify and define the relationship between a political authority and the general populace. With a larger population it became necessary to regulate the way people interacted with each other for the common good and without detriment to each other. In other words they showed why and under what conditions government is useful and ought therefore to be accepted by all reasonable people as a voluntary obligation.
But of course, times have again moved on and life has changed immeasurably since the times of Hobbes and Locke. In eighteen hundred there were about a million people living in England; an incredibly small number compared to today. It was also still a largely agrarian society. The needs of such a society were vastly different from the needs of today's societies, and it means that the matters that fall into any new social contract will be of necessity very different.
On the one hand I have to ask whether it is right that any government should restrict my use of a drone when I send it up in the air to take photographs of my house and garden.
On the other hand my neighbour has to ask whether it is right that I should be allowed to send up my drone and take photographs when he and his wife are sun-bathing wearing very little when they assumed they were private in their own garden.
And we aren't only talking about laws. The whole purpose of government in the mid twenty-first century bears no relationship to the situation even a hundred years ago.
If we look at the political parties as they are in the United Kingdom today, one has to ask how do their traditional values and outlook chime with current technology and attitudes?
At the beginning of the twentieth century England had an empire that covered a quarter of the globe. Fifty years earlier the single port of Liverpool hosted no less than forty per cent of world trade.
On a social level there was a massive underclass that was living in abject poverty and had no parliamentary representation. This laid the grounds for the rise of the Labour party, co-called because it represented the poorer, down-trodden working classes. The Conservative party traditionally represented the landed gentry.
Today we have no down-trodden working class people. We do have unfortunates, but they are not a down-trodden class needing more representation in parliament, in fact in a later chapter I shall argue that the working class is a class of people that is gradually being phased out by robotics and AI (artificial intelligence).
Landed gentry? Not many of them about today either. Those of us who own real estate usually hold a lease on an apartment, or have a mortgage on a property with a small front garden and a less small back garden. Not what I would call landed gentry at all. Instead we have a large middle class, which is about to change it's size and its meaning quite drastically over the course of the next decade. I shall go into that situation also in a later chapter.
Again, if we go back to the year 1900, we will see that although motor cars existed, they were few and far between. Electricity was also in use, but once again, very few houses were fitted with electrical circuits. Indeed, when I bought a house in Somerset at the end of the sixties it had no bathroom.
In 1900 there was no properly functioning telephone system, no radio or television. The gramophone had only just been invented, and the sound quality of the discs (shaped like jam bottles with highly coloured pictures) was what we today would regard as appalling.
There were no aeroplanes. Horse-drawn carriages filled the streets. There were certainly no tractors about, and in the countryside ninety per cent of the population were involved in agriculture. Even as late as the early fifties in the village where I lived as a child all but three people worked the farms. Now hardly anybody works on the farms as everything has been mechanised. There is even one farm in the country which is totally mechanised with no workers at all.
There were no computers a hundred years ago, no internet, no social networks. The sheer magnitude of the changes that have taken place over the course of the last hundred and twenty years is mind-boggling. One thing however, hasn't kept up, and that is the mechanism of government and what it stands for.
What we have seen so far in the actions of the governments the people of the United Kingdom have suffered in this opening period of the twenty-first century shows clearly how out of touch the current system is, and that it is time for a change to something that can deal with twenty-first century situations and problems. In short, the current political system is not fit for purpose.
I have just listed some of the changes that have taken place in just over a century. Anybody studying biology and the technology surrounding the subject will know that the past twenty-five years have changed medicine out of all recognition. The development of robotics is changing life decade by decade rather than century by century. The development of computers has grown enormously in the same way. Big data, the cloud, machine learning, and more are ushering in even more changes. And I haven't even mentioned blockchain technology which is about to change our lives even more.
We need to realise what has changed, and how that has changed the way we think, work and play, and what that is doing to the social contract. In the next chapters I will go into those changes in more detail and try and extrapolate what that will do to our societies, and how those changes will lead to other changes which we need to prepare for, and which our society needs to learn to cope with and learn fast, or we are going to get into a right royal mess.
Earlier in this chapter I pointed out a couple of indicators that things were heading in quite the wrong direction. Unless we are very careful we will wake up one morning and find we have no freedoms at all. We are now at the technological stage where a decade or two will close the gates and those of us left behind will find we no longer have choices, but are controlled by institutions which were not set up for that purpose.
Governments were set up to manage the social contract, and that contract should be ensuring that a government is there simply to be responsible for maintaining a framework within which people within a society can function as they wish to function without unduly upsetting their neighbour's ability to do the same. And it is not for government to decide what that best is. That is a matter for each member of the public.