Welcome to the jungle

Jeff Bezos, whose ownership of The Washington Post has grown increasingly controversial, has apparently grown tired of opinion journalism — the nasty habit his paper had of printing opinions he disagrees with. “From now on”, he says “we are going to be writing every day in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets. We’ll cover other topics too of course, but viewpoints opposing those pillars will be left to be published by others.” 

Explaining his decision, Bezos wrote “I’m confident that free markets and personal liberties are right for America. I also believe these viewpoints are underserved in the current market of ideas and news opinion. I’m excited for us together to fill that void.” 

It was a startling intervention with plenty of disturbing implications for news media. But it raised an interesting question. Just what is freedom? And why is it so bound — in the minds of those like Bezos — to markets? 

There are three closely related ideas behind modern liberal ideas of freedom. At the pinnacle stands the aforementioned “marketplace of ideas”, the notion that the best concepts will invariably win out over the worst in an open forum. Undergirding this airy abstract idealism is a far more mundane reality — the marketplace itself, where money, commodities and labour are traded on the open market. Companies, individuals and products compete in this marketplace; success is rewarded, failure punished; and the overall wealth of society increases in proportion to the degree this process is given free rein. Finally, sitting at the foundation of it all, is the Darwinian survival of the fittest, the biological marketplace in which the best genes reproduce, and the least fit are culled. This, anyway, was Herbert Spencer’s account of liberalism, red in tooth and claw. 

Liberalism is certainly not special — like any governing philosophy, it socially sanctions those who fail to embody its version of the good life, and identifies its laws with those of God and nature. The centrality of competition is not always obvious, especially in Britain, where a cloying civility and humanitarianism coyly conceals the real nature of our society. But strip that away, and you will find it everywhere. In fact, an increasingly pointless and cruel spirit of competition consumes more and more aspects of modern life. Parents compete to secure scarce school places for their children, children compete to secure good university places, graduates compete over scarce jobs. In the name of driving out aristocracy we have instead embraced what we like to call “meritocracy”, but in fact adds up to reducing modern life to a perpetual struggle. Cooperation and solidarity have withered away, and social and political spheres have become subordinated to the dismal science of economics. 

Liberalism, love it or loathe it, seems to be a jungle. Deadly creatures run, slither and fly beneath its branches, looking to survive, conquer and multiply. According to its advocates, this ruthless competition is what produces the scale and variety of life in the forest. But what if this idea is no more applicable to the literal jungle than it is the modern marketplace? Natural habitats are already well understood and observed to be defined as much by cooperation as by competition. Zero sum competition would produce monocultures, as a single species monopolised one level of the food chain for itself. In hyper-diverse ecosystems like jungles, even the predator-prey relationship has to serve equilibrium and harmony. 

Which brings us back to Bezos, the grinning king of the jungle stalking about his domain. There is a deep and obvious irony to the claim that the idea of the free market is itself not prospering in the marketplace of ideas, and must be rescued through the strong interventionist hand of benevolent tech oligarchs. Is the problem really that nobody is selling the free market, or is it, perhaps, that nobody is buying it anymore? 

I do not, mind you, join the outrage at this offence against the previously unsullied purity of the Washington Post. It was, after all, founded by a right wing financier who hated Roosevelt’s New Deal, and its period of crusading journalism was not unmixed with slavish Kennedy worship. Its 21st century history has been marked by supine Iraq War fever, followed by an absurd lurch into hysterical progressive grandiosity following Trump’s election. “Democracy dies in darkness” is not the watchword of a journalistic outfit, but an ideological one, and there is no point complaining if the man who pays your bills notices and decides he’d like his own ideology promoted, thank you very much. 

Which says a lot of bad things about the leadership of the Washington Post, but nothing good at all about Bezos’ nonexistent skills as a newsman. Bezos, writing of his vision for news media, argues: “There was a time when a newspaper, especially one that was a local monopoly, might have seen it as a service to bring to the reader’s doorstep every morning a broad-based opinion section that sought to cover all views. Today, the internet does that job.” 

The idea that a media organisation might have an editorial function — that it should let people know not only what is being argued about, but present the best and most relevant versions of those arguments in its pages — apparently hasn’t occurred to him. Still less the importance of platforms and publications acting to reconcile and mediate civic differences in an intelligent fashion. 

Very quickly the marketplace of ideas can become subordinated to the economic marketplace

But this is the problem with the marketplace of ideas. By what metric do we judge a successful idea? And if pluralism promotes good ideas through the mechanism of competition, will the marketplace not, at some stage, outgrow the need for intellectual diversity? Very quickly the marketplace of ideas can become subordinated to the economic marketplace.

Bezos is the embodiment of this deep tendency towards stasis and stagnancy in the liberal model. Innovation and competition are praised, but the concealed purpose of innovation and competition in this system is to ultimately dispose of the need to innovate and compete. With Amazon, Bezos has simply won the race to the monopolistic mountaintop. There is no room for competitors in his real world marketplace, so why should he tolerate them in the realm of ideas?

People are increasingly waking up to the reality that the marketplace, both economic and intellectual, is rigged against them. Liberalism itself — the idea that the individual should be autonomous and sovereign, and structures and limits upon him must be trampled down — is increasingly exposed as a joyous, nihilistic creed that can no longer offer even material prosperity. Older forms of social and spiritual authority might have curtailed individual expression, but they generated a more pluralistic society, in which distinct communities and ways of life could be created and sustained. 

Personal freedom and free markets are tired ideas whose best elements have fled and whose worst excesses are rampant. Under their influence, we have become a conformist society, stuffed into airless offices, shoved in front of screens at every age, manipulated and browbeat by a thousand invisible voices. Meritocracy has delivered rule not by the great, the good, or the wise, but instead men like Jeff Bezos — the lucky, the cunning and the ruthless.

Of course I can be accused of sour grapes. Lacking an internet fortune to throw around, I’ll probably be waiting some time before I can inform the staff of a major newspaper that the editorial line is now strictly to be in support of Christianity and the common good, and they can go elsewhere if they want to read anything else — but a man can dream.