Yes You Canute! What our new President could learn from ancient legend.

God Bless You President Obama!  And may everything that I fear about the incoming administration be proved completely wrong.

Yes, I’ll admit to having been a naysayer.  As exciting as it will be to see a JFKesque intellectual inaugurated as our first African-American president, emotionalism can’t abrogate reality.  American reality today is defined by the economic, political, and military debacles left behind by George W. Bush.  If the team assembled to take over from Bush’s White House were apostles of radical change, I would have some grounds for hope that things would actually get better.  As it is, in the absence of hope, all I can muster is good will and a prayer for good luck.  Yes, with the team of Keynsian technocrats and global interventionists surrounding our new president, it is starting to look like a who’s who of the establishment…or as another Who put it so aptly “Meet the new boss…same as the old boss!”

But even though I may not belive in “change”…I’m willing, up to a certain point, to be “fooled again”…if only because one thing always is succeptable of change: the power of  individual men and  women to change their minds.  Our new president strikes me as a pretty intelligent and adaptable guy, the only problem is that he has a tendency to adapt to the wrong sort of crowd.  It started off badly enough when he started running with the socialists of the new Old Left  in the ’90s, but these traits can be dismissed as the typical enthusiasms of a youthful idealist…albeit one who has fallen (as what American university grad hasn’t) into the clutches of the educational establishment.  From there he moved to the center…unfortunately into the center of Chicago machine politics, the inner machinations of which I don’t want to know, and he was probably wise enough to keep from knowing, but a lot of people (think of all those National Enquirer readers) are positively dying to know.   Stay tuned!  And since then it has been on and up into national politics and into the clutches of the various pressure groups that control Washington.

Still, I am enough of a believer in the Old Republic, that I would desperately like our new president to be his own man.  Call it a hopelessly romantic “Mr. Smith goes to Washington” kind of syndrome.  True, I would like him to read himself into a mature neo-liberal constitutional noninterventionism.  I would like him to read Hayek and Mises and the critiques of globalism which were written in the last century.  If he did so he would realize that increased governmental intervention at home and abroad will just dig us deeper into the pit that Keynsian (civil and military) expenditure has put us into.  But of course this is a vain hope, because the new president is going to be a very busy man…and he’s going to have a lot on his plate besides reading a lot of curmudgeonly authors whom he is in ideological disagreement with.

But somehow, some way, he still might get it (the freedom idea as libertarians understand it) by osmosis.  Sometimes it happens that, like Saul on the road to Damascus, people change their minds for no apparent reason short of the miraculous.  Even though he has no philosophical basis or education for such moves, President Obama might start to radically reduce the mission of the American military abroad, or he might start to work on reducing the national debt and selling off (rather than acquiring) bad government assests.

Who knows but that he doesn’t have some mental image in his head which will be triggered when he realizes, as he surely will at some point or other, that the plans of his interventionist advisors are bound to fail.  After all, most people first learned about freedom and the danger of hubris in high places from legends and fairy tales, not from specialized literature in economics.  Surely Barry Obama was no exception.

Yes, he surely knows the story of how King Canute ordered the  sea to turn back during the incoming tide.  Canute had an image problem diametrically opposite of modern heads of state.  Today presidents and prime ministers must give off an aura of omniscience and omnipotence…or at least be acnowlegded as privy to expert opinion eminating from policy wonks of a highly arcane and infallible ilk.  Canute, on the other hand, was trying to separate his monarchy from magic.  As James Frazier argued in his anthropological classic The Golden Bow, in Europe, as almost everywhere else…kings were held to be magical, and almost superhuman.  The problem with being thought superhuman is that as soon as people catch on to the fact that you aren’t, rather than give up their illusions they are likely to dispose of you and find another candidate for superhumanity.

Canute was no anthropologist of the caliber of Frazier or Rene Girard, but he was prudent enough to figure out that people have a penchant for turning on their gods and making them scapegoats for their own problems.  His ready response was a preemptive attack on any and all panderers who wanted to turn him into more than what he was, namely, an old Viking who had managed by cunning and inheritance to possess a large portion of the British Isles.  So his bold self-demytholization, in failing to turn the tide, turned luck in his favor…and ensured that he would go down in history as a worthy man, rather than a wicker man.

In modern jargon, Canute discovered the power of reduced expectations.  It is certainly a power that our new president could avail himself of, and he dosn’t have to read a lot of arcane economic treatises to find out about it.  It is written, and largely unwritten, in the wisdom of the ages…all those fairy tales and legends that say there is no omnipotent king this side of the Kingdom of Heaven…and that worldy kings who aspire to godhood sooner or later pay the price for their hubris.

So what should Obama do if he wants to be a Canute rather than an Agamemnon?  I’m not in the bussiness of giving policy advice…there are too many people in that line of work already.  I think Mr. Obama can figure it out by himself, as soon as he recognizes a few basic principles.  The basic principle is that governments don’t control reality…all they can do is cope with it.  A government is just one organization is a vast sea called society, and the ebb and flow of society’s tides are so complex and conditional on a variety of factors, natural and human, that the wisest thing to do is just to go with the flow…as the Physiocrats would say “lassez faire” or as the Taoists would say “wu-wei”…or as King Canute would say “I give up!”

If the American government would give up trying to micromanage the world economically, politically, millitarily, and environmentally the results would, I believe, be paradoxical.  The governement would actually become a more effective instrument in the control of those who are supposedly sovereign…the voting public.  A government which attempted to do less would be a government which might actually be more effective, surfing, like Canute, with the current of the markets and popular opinion rather than swimming against the rip tides.   Its the kind of policy which could save a presidency, and a country.

Its the sort of policy which I think the course of events will eventually force Mr. Obama to consider, but I’m not so deluded as to think that it will happen any time soon.  Right now is party time…in both senses of the word, and in a political sense I even suppose the Democrats deserve it.  Some are caviling at the cost of the inauguration, 150 million dollars, but lets face it, in terms of recent government expenditures, that’s chump change.  If it were up to me I’d even add an extra touch.  I’d appoint someone to sit behind Barrak Obama in Caddilac One and whisper, like the Romans did to their generals during a triumph, “you are a mortal…”

Canute knew that, and deep down I suspect that President Obama differs from his more deluded followers in acnowleging his own limitations.  Public acnowlegement of those limitation could be the begining of real change, a reversal of the tide of power which has accumulated in Washington and the rise of a powerful current flowing back towards the people.

Yes we Canute!