Revenant Victorians

One of the stories that caught my eye this week was Eric Schmidt's pronouncement that the UK should return to the Victorian era attitude of bringing art and science together. The google CEO made his comments in a speech that was part of a media festival in Edinburgh, and you can read about it here.  It's an interesting argument, and worth a lot more time than I'm going to spend on it here; I'll need to revisit it in a later post.

I mention it mainly because I had already been thinking about Victorian England's great social projects, in the wake of all the hubbub over property tax caps and the like. All of it seems to me to amount to a whole lot of noise that boils down to one thing: people like to have a say about where their money goes. Simple, right? I mean, that whole American revolution thing was about taxation without representation supposedly. So in essence we elect leaders, who we pay, to budget for us collectively, and then we complain about it, fire them, and elect new leaders who we then complain about. It seems dysfunctional.

Was it always dysfunctional? I doubt it. Like most systems, it was developed in response to the conditions of the time, using the technology of the time to develop ideas and project solutions. Given the technological infrastructure and educational levels within the population when the US was founded, I'm sure it made a great deal of sense to have a representative democracy. But clinging to this system now seems about as logical to me as insisting that everyone ride horseback and churn their own butter.

This brings me back to the Victorians, in particular, to Bentham and Mayhew, and the idea that the educated should prepare exhaustive studies of the needs of the citizens. To me this fits comfortably in the mindset of a representative democracy, and the hierarchical structure of most of our social organizations still bear the stamp and flavor of these origins. It is based on an informational system that was conditioned by the prevailing technological (the cost of printing presses) and the social (high cost of education, high population density of illiterate, etc.) of the day that necessitated a largely unidirectional flow of information. But those technological and social conditions have been superceded in our own time, which leaves the possibility of a new system that might have a more functional cycle than the present ill fit between system and technology allows.

What got me thinking about this in the first place was thinking about the tax-exempt status of churches. If churches are teaching about social responsibility (as most of the churches I've ever gone to do) then it seems that they should shoulder some of the tax burden. But then it occurred to me that churches already do spend a great deal of their funds on social projects. But then again it might be the case that church organizations are duplicating some of the administrative costs that government organizations administering social programs also face. If churches contributed tax money to government programs, wouldn't that remove some of the redundancy, so that more money would be going directly to the recipients of the social programs? But then again, there rises the specter of programs considered immoral by certain  religious organizations–wouldn't it be wrong to force them to contribute to such programs?

That's when it hit me. Rather than force religious organizations to behave more like government institutions, government institutions could adopt some of the methodologies of religious (and other non-profit) institutions. How so? Here's my example. If I want to give a sum of money to a church, I can attach a stipulation that the funds be applied to a certain project, or go to a certain budget. The same would occur if I were to donate money to a university. Why couldn't that approach be utilized in funding government services? (I know, I know, insert your favorite old bake sale bumper sticker here.) Such an approach would never have worked when the government began collecting taxes, because the information infrastructure did not exist to support it. Imagine today, however. When I go online to file my taxes, there is no technological reason why I could not be presented with a screen with drop down boxes that allows me to set a certain percentage of the funds to go to Budget Item A, a certain amount to go to Budget Item B. Imagine–a direct voice telling the government exactly what programs people are willing to spend money on, and which they aren't. Wouldn't this create more of a sense of a shared vision, or at the very least point out with a much greater degree of accuracy where the conflicts were and how they might be resolved?

It's a crazy idea, but nevertheless, I'm working on some visuals for it.

But enough seriousness, right? I've also been working on a new album, which isn't ready yet, and a new single, which is called "Thief of Hearts."