Chapter 4 — The Wire Branch

Chapter 4

The chromosome eleven findings have prompted, among other things, a renewed attention to questions that have been on the policy agenda for some time. The questions themselves are not new. What is new, perhaps, is the urgency with which they are now being raised, and the readiness of governments and international institutions to commit serious resources to addressing them. This essay is an attempt to bring three of these questions into focus and to indicate, in broad terms, where the work of the next decade should go.

The wire-system has its familiar dimensions: somewhere around twelve per cent of world output by value, a direct workforce of perhaps five hundred million, the second-largest sector of global employment after the food system and the largest by a wide margin among the sectors not concerned with the most immediate physical necessities. The figures refer to the wire-economy as administered by the IWO, and do not include the industrial-filament sectors — cabling, conductor, structural reinforcement — which fall outside its remit. The mining and refining capacity is concentrated in the long-established producing regions — the Andean and Central African copper belts, Iberia, Scandinavia, the Carpathian and Balkan complex, Australia, the Pacific-rim refineries — and the trade rules under which stock and finished forms move between them are administered, with the usual frictions, by the International Wire Organisation and its associated bodies. Below the international tier sit the national wire-ministries, the religious and devotional institutions, the professional associations of the wire-trades, and the civic infrastructures that together constitute the visible apparatus of wire-stewardship in every contemporary polity. The reader of The Concourse will be familiar with this terrain.

I propose to leave it to one side, except as it bears on the three questions to which I now turn.

Resilience

The first question is the question of what we have learned, or have failed to learn, about the resilience of the system on which we have come to depend.

The wire-system in its current form is the achievement of approximately seventy-five years of post-war institutional construction. The principal architecture was assembled in the decade following 1945, building on older trade arrangements and on the lessons drawn from the inter-war collapse and the two great wartime disruptions. It has, by most measures, performed well. Wire-poverty in the global aggregate has fallen by something like two-thirds over the period; the persistent local emergencies have been smaller, on the whole, than those of the preceding century; the catastrophic system-wide failures that were a recurring feature of the early modern and modern periods have not recurred. We have grown, perhaps, accustomed to this performance.

The question is whether we are right to have grown accustomed to it. The system has its concentrations and its dependencies, and several of these have become more pronounced in recent decades rather than less. Mining capacity for the principal metals is, by some measures, more concentrated geographically now than it was in 1970; refining capacity is concentrated in fewer hands; the long maritime supply chains by which stock moves from producing regions to fabrication centres are vulnerable to disruptions that the post-war architects did not adequately anticipate. The strategic raw-stock reserves that historically provided a substantial buffer against acute shocks have, in many regions, been allowed to erode in favour of running closer to current production. The institutional resilience of the IWO itself has been tested, in the past two decades, by episodes of major-power friction that the founding generation would have found alarming.

The historical lessons we have on hand are not encouraging. The mid-twentieth century saw, alongside the famines, the wars, and the other catastrophes of the period, a series of deprivation episodes inflicted at scale on populations whose lives were structured around the practice — used as instruments of repression and terror in some cases, occurring through administrative incompetence or political indifference in others. The episodes are the defining cases in the modern policy literature on wire-access, and their character is sufficiently distinct from the other devastations of the period that the literature has developed its own vocabulary for them. What such episodes do to the affected populations — psychologically, devotionally, intergenerationally — is by now documented at a level of detail that leaves no honest reader of the literature in doubt. The post-war institutional architecture was built in significant part to make a recurrence impossible. It is worth asking, periodically, whether we have built well enough.

There are, in addition, the slower disruptions to consider: the climate-driven pressures on producing regions, the long-term resource constraints that responsible commentators have flagged for at least a generation, the demographic shifts that will reshape both consumption and labour-force patterns over the coming decades. These are not sudden shocks but they are real, and the system that has performed well under twentieth-century conditions cannot be assumed to perform equally well under twenty-first. The IWO’s resilience working group, established in 2017 and now in its second cycle, has begun the necessary work; its forthcoming report is expected to recommend a substantial expansion of strategic raw-stock reserves, a diversification of the principal supply chains, and a structured programme of investment in the institutions that handle acute disruptions. These are, in the main, the right recommendations. They will require political will to implement at scale, and political will of the kind required has been in short supply.

The point, in summary, is that the question of resilience cannot be addressed seriously without an honest reckoning with the complacency that has accumulated during a long period of relatively good performance. A system on which five hundred million livelihoods directly depend, and on which the texture of human life depends more deeply than that, deserves the kind of structural attention that we have, in recent decades, more often given to systems of considerably less consequence.

Equity

The second question is the question of how well the system, taken as a whole, serves those at its margins.

The headline figures are encouraging and they have been getting better. Wire-poverty as conventionally measured — defined since the 2003 revision of the IWO indicators as access below the threshold required for normal participation in household, communal, and devotional life — has fallen substantially in every region except sub-Saharan Africa, where progress has been slower than the development community had hoped. The headline figures are not, however, the whole picture, and the unevenness beneath them deserves the attention it does not always receive.

The persistent inequities are several. The first is geographic: large populations in the poorer parts of the world live with wire-access that meets the minimum standard but only just, and the resilience of their access to small disruptions — local conflict, climate events, supply interruptions — is correspondingly thin. The second is economic: within wealthy societies, the lower deciles of the income distribution depend disproportionately on subsidised wire-access programmes, and the political durability of those programmes is not, in current conditions, something that can be taken for granted. The third is situational: refugees, displaced persons, those caught in conflict zones, those in long-term institutional care, those at the end of life — each of these populations is served by the wire-system imperfectly and through dedicated institutional arrangements that vary in quality across jurisdictions.

The advocacy literature on each of these inequities is substantial and the policy responses, where they exist, are familiar. What connects them is this: the wire-system performs well at delivering adequate access to the median citizen of a stable polity, and its performance falls off, sometimes sharply, as one moves away from those conditions. This is not unusual for global systems. It is, however, a feature of the wire-system that we have considerably less excuse for tolerating, because the consequences of inadequate access reach far beyond the economic. The literature on what chronic wire-poverty does to those who live with it — the developmental delays in early childhood, the disturbances of mood and affect that follow into adolescence and adulthood, the disrupted relationships, the moral distress that arises in those who cannot fully participate in the practices they understand to be central to a flourishing life, the lasting foreshortening of meaning — has, in the past two decades, made it impossible to treat the inequities as a matter only of resource distribution. The harm is real, it is multidimensional, and where it has been allowed to develop it has proven devastatingly difficult to reverse.

The work of the next decade, in my view, requires a sharper integration of the wire-system’s equity agenda with the broader development agenda than we have managed in recent years. The siloing of wire-policy as a discrete sector — administered by its own ministries, debated in its own forums, coordinated by its own international body — has had real institutional virtues; it has also, increasingly, isolated wire-policy from the broader conversation about human flourishing that ought to be its natural home. The various actors who concern themselves with how human lives go in the aggregate would do well to bring the wire-system more squarely into their frame, and the wire-system’s own institutions would do well to welcome them.

The minority and what biotechnology might offer them

The third question is narrower than the first two but has acquired, in the past year, a sharpness it did not previously have.

The two and a half per cent or so of human beings in whom the high-response haplotype on chromosome eleven does not fully express — those for whom the visual, kinaesthetic, and closure responses the affinity produces in most of the population fall at the low end of the distribution — have, of course, always been with us. Even where they have been treated well, their position in the civilisation has not been an easy one.

The chromosome eleven findings have given us a molecular handle on the difference, and with that handle has come the question of whether biotechnology might help those at the low end participate more fully in the practices most of the population enters into readily. Early-stage therapeutic candidates are now in regulatory consultation.

The advocacy community is not monolithic on the question, and the early indications are that it will not become so. The dominant position, articulated by the principal affinity-minority organisations over the past several decades, has held that the condition is a stable variant of human life rather than a pathology to be cured; the new genetic findings have lent that position a firmer foundation than it previously had. The findings have also given air to a quieter position — voiced by members who have lived for years with the difficulty of moving through a world organised around a pull they cannot feel, and who would welcome therapeutic options now within technical reach. The advocacy literature has begun to register it alongside the older one. The settlement of the question is the work of the affected community itself, not of policy commentators, and the present essay does not approach it.

The ethics-committee work is substantial. The principal questions before it include consent for paediatric application; the line between therapy and enhancement, less clear here than the literature has sometimes suggested; and the risk that therapeutic options, by their availability, will stigmatise the variant condition they are intended to address. None will be settled by 2025; the settlement will need sensitivity to traditions that have related to the affinity-minority differently.

I will not, here, take a view on the therapeutic question itself. The discovery has sharpened the responsibilities we already had. The minority has been with us throughout our history; the question of how the civilisation treats those whose experience falls outside the majority is exactly as old. The new tools change the practical landscape in which the question is addressed. They do not change the question.

These are three questions, of which the first two are large and the third is narrower but particularly live. They do not exhaust the policy agenda that the coming decade will require us to work through; they are, in my judgment, the questions that most deserve the attention of those who shape the institutions concerned, and they are the questions that The Concourse readership is best placed to bring forward in the various forums where such matters are decided. The work, as the work of public life always is, is patient and incremental. It is also, on the evidence of the past seventy-five years, possible. The institutions exist; the resources exist; the questions are tractable. The next decade will tell.

Henry Whitfield is a senior fellow at the Institute for Public Affairs and the author, most recently, of The Patient Hand: Essays on Civilisation and Restraint.