The Treasonous Clerk is the regular philosophical, literary, and political commentary of James Matthew Wilson.

Allow me to advance a paradox. The most significant attribute of the recent financial crisis into which our country has fallen is the saturation of very precise, indeed quantifiable, realities in a blast-radius of non-specificity. The great majority of Americans, including those at the highest levels of government, have been told that a body of numerical, legal, and determined data will have incalculable, palpable, and immanent effects on the life of their country. The causes are known, but to most people remain incomprehensible; the consequences are merely predicted, but are appropriately cast in language of almost visceral (blood-chilling) vividness. We—and here I include myself—do not fully know how this has happened, but we understand what it will do.

Allow me to make a prescription. Any political community would be not merely unwise but insane to allow its internal practices—its political practices, its market practices—to continue in a manner so complex that they blind the body politic to how they work or what they mean.

Allow a diagnosis. We not only have allowed such practices to continue, but have done so for so long and in so many aspects of our lives, that we are almost incapable of subjecting them to serious scrutiny. And we continue to allow them despite their violation of our nature and their actual consequences for our happiness.

It was not always thus. That said, it has been for a good while. Perhaps only as late as the eighteenth century, a consensus emerged among certain European political and religious groups that community was not an outgrowth of the natural order, but a technology that mankind had created and therefore subject entirely to mankind’s decision. The struggle to realize republican and democratic theories of government stems from this consensus. The apparently natural hierarchical societies that culminated in aristocratic classes and/or a sovereign monarch were “de-naturalized,” meaning, strictly speaking, that an emergent bourgeoisie concluded that traditional hierarchies were no more natural than any other political form; for practical purposes, these same bourgeois concluded that such hierarchies were unnatural, or against nature. The late appearance of ideas like the “divine right of kings” testifies to a longstanding convention in retreat: the aristocratic order no longer appeared natural, and so it was forced to explain itself for the first time and in terms of the supernatural, the divine. Unfortunately for, say, the aristocracy of France, their natural distinction had to be sacrificed on the altar of the newly divinized monarch.

Rhetorically, this realization that society was a technology subject entirely to its members’ deliberation suggested that democracy was the long unrealized but supremely natural social form. In actual terms, this realization led to the further discovery that politics was a difficult technology and could not be subjected to the low level of rationality most persons are capable of attaining. Hence, the formation of new large political communities consistently entailed the founding of new, carefully constricted elite communities. While Benjamin Franklin was agitating publicly for American democracy and the creation of the United States, he was also chartering an untold number of secret societies to help him control the machinations of American politics. In the eighteenth, and perhaps even through to the beginning of the twentieth century, Americans and other westerners were able to sustain this dual consciousness. Politics was of and by the people, even as the presence of half-concealed elites indicated that the state might be a technology too complicated for those people (as opposed to the mere abstraction, the people) who nominally controlled it.

In the last century, of course, a different kind of technology emerged and came to define our society: scientific technology. The harnessing of dazzling scientific discoveries for practical applications already disturbed the sleep and prompted the nervous mirth of the Victorians. I recall once looking at photographs of a late-nineteenth-century theater production in the village of Amherst, Massachusetts: the local thespians lampooned the new gizmos transforming their province: the “Novo-cyclo-bolo-ramas” and “auto-loco-photo-matics,” whose only clear attributes were that they did new things and that most folks didn’t understand how.