Kings long ago lost their mystery; now even the tribunes of the people are willingly conniving in the trivialisation of their own persons, and even the process by which they were chosen. In such a climate the self-respect of the electorate cannot last for long.

Heads of state issue comments and official statements via the internet’s social meda channels, going round and about their own Parliaments. All elected representatives must follow, for that channel is their Chamber now. – If they do not tweet they will not have a voice at all, for utterances in parliament are obscure. Indeed, it used to be said that the best way to keep a secret was to disclose it in a speech in the House of Lords; perhaps that is now also true of the Commons. Is anybody listening? Is there anybody there?

Some will think this an interesting, even an important stage in the evolution of our democracy. I am not so optimistic. An erosion of the dignity of State involves the slender range of common interests to which it gives body; and it leaves employees of the state in a much stronger position. Indeed, as social cohesion loses its gravitational power, never strong, the personnel of functional government will necessarily use the state’s monopoly of violence or force in small ways and large to prevent disintegration. And it will be a strange man that does welcome this, for it will be obviously necessary, but he will be a fool that does not fear its longer consequences.

The faceless organ of state power must become stronger as elected politicians and the electorate itself lose dignity, and without a dignified politics and a self-respecting electorate, the organ of state can no longer be held in check. Since it is made up of men and women, the state can only be self-serving, for we know no other condition, institutional or personal. But when in balance with politicians and people, a compromise is forced upon the personnel of government. But without this limiting pressure the organ of state must expand, for it has no other option, and since it will often be exapnding in response to disintegration in the public sphere it will have much justification.

Unless the people and their representatives can regain self-respect and dignity, unless they can rescue themselves from triviality, the end of this trajectory is an authoritarian state. – The consequences of being game for a laugh, or showing a sense of humour, are grave in the extreme. Worst of all, perhaps, the recovery of dignity may also pass through this unappealing authoritarian stage. Louis Napoléon is not a pretty thought.

Those who dislike Mandeville, while at the same time feeling the force of his arguments, suggest that he is more libertine than libertarian, a farceur, not l'homme serieux, as his near predecessor Hobbes so obviously is. As it happens, since the seventeenth century the sense of "libertine" seems to have shifted somewhat towards a condemnation of sensual indulgence, and away from the broader sense which included implications that if not quite political in the strict sense are certainly conscious of an ethical resonance broader than the simple and unbridled satisfaction of the appetites.

In any case, squabbling over these terms is somewhat to miss the point of Mandeville's argument to the effect that there is no clear stopping point at which a line can be drawn in the scale of human wishes, on one side of which we can declare all to be vice, with virtue on the other side. – Virtue is the complete denial of human wishes or it is nothing, or nothing but a shifty compromise that hardly deserves the name. Similarly we cannot separate liberty of a type that we do not wholly dislike from that we detest. Liberty is complete liberty or, again, it is nothing.

But in both cases we find it practically necessary to draw lines, however indefensible in principle, for practical ends (in order to satisfy another wish). – M.'s point, or so it seems to me, is that is not in our own interests to pretend that there is anything very solid about these lines. The theologian, the moralist, insisting on Virtue as an absolute must be a rigorist in theory compromising theory in order to deliver wealth. The lover of freedom must be a Libertine in theory, compromising his theory in order to preserve stability in the societal system.

An article in The Times today reports that information from the National Audit Office (NAO) of the United Kingdom to the effect that “Family sizes shrink to their lowest level”, with the fertility rate dropping to 1.9 children per woman. Around 20% of women do not have any children, a proportion that is, it seems, historically anomalous.

An ONS statistician is quoted with a precise summary:

"Women born in 1971 who completed their bearing in 2016 had an average 1.9 children per woman, fewer than their mothers' generation, born 1944, who had 2.21 children, and the lowest level on record."

Some will doubtless interpret this as showing that rich people have other interests than fulfilling biological drives, but there are other possible explanations. – In a complex, competitive society the cost of maintaining a satisfactory position from which an individual can securely reproduce leaves less over for investment in the offspring, a pressure that encourages lower fertility to maintain high levels of resource concentration per child. On this view, in spite of appearances, and careless chatter about the demographic transition, people are still maximising their reproduction, but the conditions are such that this means smaller family sizes. Another way of approaching this is to say that as general societal complexity moves further from thermodynamic equilibrium, the human species is becoming further K-shifted in its reproductive strategies.

Politics is produced by the tension between self-interest and that compromise with the interests of others needed in order to secure an individual's self-interest.

Bayle's Miscellaneous Reflections, Occasion'd by the Comet which appear'd in December 1680, first published in an English translation in 1708, is ostensibly an attack on popular superstitions, but the cumulative effect of the argument inevitably erodes the religion that the author claims to uphold. He must have known this. If a man can see the reasons that make the attribution of supernatural owers to the visible comet a superstition, then the attribution of such power to an invisible deity is all the more absurd.

The late 17th Century in England presents the reader of that country's literature with the first minds definitely of the modern model, perceiving and convinced of the sole sufficiency of the material world to explain all phenomena. Indeed, they are less prone to residual illusions of transcendence than many in the present. Others before them had perceived the superiority of materialist explanations, but were not fully convinced, or staved off conviction with very reasonable scepticism.

The new conviction struck men in different ways, for all philosophies come in various flavours, sour, salt, and sweet. Hobbes describes his conclusions without a tremor; Butler weeps, and Mandeville shrugs his shoulders and laughs. Hobbes saw it plain, and took it for what it was worth; Butler regretted the lies of the past and the opportunities foregone; Mandeville embraced the freedom and consequent riches of the present, come what may.

Every man, woman, and child has been the youngest person on earth, and some more than once. But you could live a very long life and never be the oldest. Inexperience is cheap; wisdom, rare and consequently dear.

It is a commonplace of the history of natural science and philosophy to think of change over time as a gradual clearing of the mist in all minds, as if each individual were gradually able to see better. However, the literature tells a different story; in every age we see traces of minds that were, with little evidence, clearly on the right track and in many cases had leapt with good reasoning to sound though very abstract conclusions. Epicurus is a good example, but every age is rich in such examples. 

If there is anything to the concept of the intellectual mist lifting, it is that more accurate concepts increase in frequency and may even come to dominate a population. In other words, that there is an average effect over the whole population of human minds. But this insight should remind us that this is not a monotonic phenomenon, with a burst of light – Let Newton Be... – after which irreversible progress has been made. Shifts in the population of mental representations are prone to ebb and flow, for a complex of reasons not all of which drive internal coherence and correspondence.

There is, of course, much evidence for the accumulation of vastly increased informational and evidential material over time. It is true that this too is prone to setbacks – Alexandrian libraries are sometimes burned – but the trend over the last two millenia has been towards increased volumes of evidence, and provided that the energy supply to human societies does not falter, and a sufficient part of that supply is devoted to informational maintenance, it is likely to continue.

But this simple increase in informational mass or volume is not a good description for change in intellectual history, where transitions are of a somewhat, though not entirely different character. Change is accounted for by fluctuations in predominance or frequency rather than appearances and disappearances; clear, correspondent statements may increase in predominance or frequency, rather than crystallizing out of fresh air. Of course concepts do, let there be no doubt about this, become more complex, detailed, fine-grained, qualified, and descriptively and predictively accurate, but the head terms that are the abstract summaries of a whole population of modern statements, change little, because they are sufficiently abstract to retain their purchase on life and matter. This accounts for the otherwise puzzling truth that while there is nothing new under the sun in science and philosophy it cannot be denied that real progress is made. Heraclitus prefigures thermodynamics, however eliptically; thermodynamics is not new, but it is genuine progress. All the sciences, without exception, provide similar examples. Intellectual progress is not a matter of sudden enlightenment, by transcendent revelation, but the refinement of propositions under existing headings, and an increase in the frequency of their representation in the population of minds.

All our facts, the facts of which we are aware, are abstract, and the more profound their claims the more super-abstract they become. And when some say, in their vaunting carelessness, that there is no limit to what can be known, or, which is more frequent, when they avoid saying such a foolish thing but quietly behave as if it were so, they mean or tacitly believe that all the facts of the universe before the present may be comprehended beneath some hyper-abstract description. No doubt this is possible, but descriptions of this kind are so lacking in detail that they would have little interest, particularly because they would be so vague that their future orientation, their predictions, would be so general that they would not differ at all from an abstract account of the past, and would hardly seem to count as predictions at all since it is inconceivable that they could be wrong. That is not surprising, since they must transcend time; but without a temporal dimension they lose relevance to time-bound organisms.

Ubbelohde notes with emphasis and reason that periods of international conflict often coincide with significant progress in science and engineering. This should not surprise us. Progress in these fields is very costly, and implies a significant, short-run opportunity cost to the securing of reproduction for the wider population. It will therefore find a limit, an equilibrium well below the theoretical maximum for progress. Put another way, in peacetime science and engineering will not progress as fast as it could, because the population prefers to consume the wealth rather than assigning that resource to science. In times of war, the presence of deadly external threat alters that balance and means that it becomes reasonable and probably worthwhile to assign more resources to science and technology, in other words to reduce security of reproduction a little in the short run in order to increase it in the longer run.