Governmental benefits

On Thursday, BBC Radio 4 interviewed an academic about the government’s proposed benefit cuts. He suggested that the government’s aim was to track behaviour changes in benefit claimants in real time in order to adjust payments accordingly. He was skeptical about the possibilities of this. It does confirm what I suggested in my previous post, that the government has, on some level, an ambition towards total and real time knowledge of the population.

PS see here for Remy’s follow up to our earlier conversation on gradualism and Anglo-Foucaultians.

Government at school

In 1833 a British MP stated in parliament that he would rather see an increase in the infant mortality rate than interfere in the domestic hearth. I want to suggest that now the government takes the opposite approach, in that its ambitions are towards a complete, exhaustive and real-time knowledge of every child in the country. Each time a child dies there is a Serious Case Review (SCR) in order to learn lessons for future policy and legislation for government (and other agencies). Agencies are now encouraged to communicate with one another so that any significant information or patterns missed by one agency but picked up by another can be shared, so that a more complete picture of the child’s life is available. The ideal is to line up every agency so that a crack in one is caught by another agency, so that no cracks completely line up for a child to fall through. In order to decide what information is significant, norms must be created against which to judge each child. Paediatricians have obesity measures; teachers and social workers decide about smell, health, dress, behaviour, language.

There is a background assumption here that the state must check on every family to ensure it is looking after its child properly, which is to say, in accordance with the norms set by various institutions and apparatuses. This seems to be very close to saying that no family can be trusted to look after its children. This lack of trust is compounded by the increased suspicion with which one must regard all other adults in their relations with children. Ideally, an adult and child would never be alone together, or at least not without having been checked by the criminal records bureau. Even though very few people, if any, think that no family can be trusted to look after its children, and even though very few people ever suspect anyone who works with children as being a danger to children, people are made to act as if this is the case anyway.

This is somewhat unusual for a liberal democracy. Liberalism wants to protect the rights of individuals, including from interference by the government (hence the 1833 politician). Liberalism also, according to some, regards some things as beyond the government’s ability to know or govern, at least entirely – civil society, the economy, individuals – yet try to govern it must. Each failure is a chance to improve governing (hence the SCRs). Yet in ‘safeguarding’ terms, the government seems to have an ambition precisely to know all there is to know about every child (or at least enough to assess any possible danger). This is both an extension of government power to every child and those who work with them (and the relevant institutions and apparatuses), and its intensification in the desire to know more of each child and worker in order to govern them. I think this is benevolently motivated but is definitely a paternalistic side of liberalism.

Foucault on the church and state

In the lecture from March 15th in Security, Territory, Population, Foucault notes the way that the cosmo-theological continuum broke down in the 16th century so that political rule ceased to refer to ends outside itself (such as God) and developed a new immanent, secular raison d’État. Along with this the knowledge necessary to the ruler shifted from phronesis and knowledge of natural and divine laws to knowledge about the state, statistics. (Now let’s suppose, though Foucualt doesn’t talk about the present day church, that for the church this cosmo-theological continuum still exists and that most church members agree with it and agree to being governed towards transcendent and moral ends). The question is shouldn’t we be glad about this? Isn’t this, in fact, a fairly decent way to run church state-relations? And if so, does this make critique of the state a little more difficult? After all, what’s the point in critiquing the state for not being like the church? The state doesn’t recognise the same morality from within its point of view, from within its game, unless it is to see that it doesn’t undermine itself by losing the support of the populace. If one goes down this line, does it make less sense to focus on the church’s distinctive beliefs and practices and more on what common reforms and goods can be pursued with other groups?