Copyright © 1998 by Paul F. deLespinasse, Adrian College
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Footnotes are at the end of the chapter.
"Unfortunately, the image of a spaceship [earth] is also used to promote measures that are suicidal. One of them is a generous immigration policy, which is only a particular instance of a class of policies that are in error because they lead to the tragedy of the commons. These suicidal policies are attractive because they mesh with what we unthinkingly take to be the ideals of 'the best people.' What is missing in the idealistic view is an insistence that rights and responsibilities must go together. The 'generous' attitude of all too many people results in asserting inalienable rights while ignoring or denying matching responsibilities."For the metaphor of a spaceship to be correct the aggregation of people on board would have to be under unitary sovereign control. A true ship always has a captain. It is conceivable that a ship could be run by a committee. But it could not possibly survive if its course were determined by bickering tribes that claimed rights without responsibilities."
Garrett Hardin, "Living On A Lifeboat"(1974)
An ideal government requires the rule of law, in which sanctions can be imposed only on individuals duly convicted of violating a general rule of action. The rule of law, as we have seen, in turn requires political democracy and a freedom of voluntary association such that there will be a market economy. The rule of law also has one additional implication. It requires that government be universal. Under present technological circumstances, this means that an ideal government must be a world government.
The rule of law was not on my mind forty-some years ago when I first determined that our world badly needed a unified government. I was a high school student and had not even begun to think about the problems which lead me, fifteen years later, to discover the distinction between laws and pseudolaws. My concern at the time was the Cold War and the possible employment of atomic weapons. Early morning bomb testing over in Nevada produced flashes of light on the horizon that were plainly visible from our residence in Vallejo, California.
Several times in my life I have gotten an important idea as the result of unlikely chains of events. This was the first time. Our high school honor society made a field trip to nearby SanFrancisco on November 10, 1955. We toured some cultural facility and then had several hours to wander on Market Street before returning home. I happened to go into a bookstore. There, I ran into a used copy of a ten-year-old book by Norman Cousins. I bought the book, Modern Man Is Obsolete, for 10 cents. It was many years before I realized the immense influence this book had on my life and career.
The book expanded on several editorials Cousins had written for the Saturday Review of Literature shortly after the atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. Cousins forcefully argued that to retain national sovereignty in a world with atomic weapons would produce catastrophe. To prevent catastrophe, power at the world level was necessary, but power without law was impossible, and law was impossible without a government to enforce it. So argued Cousins in 1945. When I read his words ten years later I found them utterly convincing.
Even if Cousin's rationale for world government was not as convincing as it seemed to me then, his case was still strong. Although atomic war turned out to be less likely than he thought, even a small possibility of such a disastrous war is too much. And there can be no doubt that his conclusion was a correct one: we need a world government, if we are going to live a civilized, orderly, reasonably prosperous life together on planet earth.
Cousins' book had a profound influence on my life. In undermined my assumption that I would become an engineer or scientist. Did we need still more "progress" in the technology with which we were already politically unable to cope? Did I really want to contribute to such technological progress? Or should I work instead in the political arena to help develop conditions where these new technologies would protect and improve life, not eradicate it from the face of the earth?
A future physicist bought Modern Man is Obsolete. Without being quite aware of it, a future political scientist finished reading the book.
A world government would have a number of practical advantages, which we will examine in due course. But the principle that government must comply with the rule of law is more important than these practical advantages. This principle requires that government be universal.
Genuine laws must be general rules of action. A law draws a "line" and tells people, "don't step across this line in your actions or we will punish you." Since law metaphorically draws lines, it might seem that nothing could be simpler for it than to draw such lines literally and physically. National borders can be considered lines which people cross without cannot step without permission of the governments having jurisdiction. A person entering a jurisdiction without the permission of its government is an "illegal alien" who can be expelled unceremoniously. Is this not the most natural thing in the world?
The problem here is that the lines drawn by a genuine law must apply to the actions of all people who step across them, not just to those of some people. A government which treats citizens who step in across the border line differently from aliens who do so is not enforcing a general rule of action. To be an alien is a status, not an action. To treat people on the basis of such a status is just as much a pseudolaw as to treat them on the basis of their race, sex, age, etc. The concept of an "illegal alien" is therefore a legal abomination.
It is also raises serious moral questions. How can any group of people have the moral right to draw a line around part of the earth and say "We give ourselves a collective monopoly of the right to be here and to act here and to live here"? Was this a right previously held by individuals who somehow delegated that right to the collective group? Or is it a right that for some mysterious reason inherently belongs to groups, at least certain kinds of groups, but not to individuals? If so, on the basis of what principles is it to be ascertained which groups have such rights and which groups do not?
In real life, claims to exclusive jurisdiction or "sovereignty" over specific territory are always based on the physical ability of some people to prevent other people from entering and to prevent other groups from taking control of the territory. But ability to hold territory by force does not imply any moral right to the territory. And even the de facto control by force only lasts until some other group manages to marshall more force. This is the game played today.
Are some people less intrinsically significant than other people? Are people any less human beings because they happened to be born on one side of a geographical line rather than the other? As Henry George used to ask, do those who arrive early for a banquet have the right to turn up the vacant chairs around the table and tell latecomers, "No room! No room!"?
There is only one way that a specific group of people could get a legitimate right to exclusive occupancy of a certain territory. It would have to lease the land from its owner, the universal public, for a limited number of years at an annual rent determined by a competitive bidding process. However such a procedure implies the existence of a world government to act as trustee for the universal public. And the lease would extend only to occupancy and use of the land in question, not to political jurisdiction over it, which the universal government could not transfer without ceasing thereby to be universal.
Perhaps we can imagine a world of sovereign independent governments none of which discriminate against aliens. Such governments would claim exclusive jurisdiction to legislate for a given geographical region; their rules would apply uniformly to all individuals who happened to be in that territory or to come there. They would not claim power to exclude anybody from the area over which they exercise jurisdiction. All residents would automatically have full rights to vote in elections.
This world would resemble the situation inside the United States. U.S. citizens move from one state to another without needing permission. After a very nominal residency period, they can vote in all elections. They cannot be subjected to laws which do not apply equally to long-time state residents. One gains citizenship in a state by moving there and loses citizenship in a previous state by moving out. But of course there is the one important difference between the world of nations as we are imagining it and the states in today's U.S.: the U.S. has a central, common government in addition to the governments of the individual states. And national citizenship is treated as paramount.
A closer analogy to the world we are imagining existed in Germany from the fall of the Wall late in 1989 until the unification of West and East Germany a year later, in 1990. Although East Germans were citizens of an independent country, West German law did not recognize this fact. Any East German moving to West Germany was immediately considered to be a citizen. Now if East Germany had a similar policy (but who would have wanted to move there?) we would have had, in microcosm, the situation we are imaging. Extrapolate this to the point that all countries follow the West German example and grant citizenship automatically to anybody who moves in, placing no limits on the right to enter, and we would have the full realization of the principle that there can be no such thing as an illegal alien.
It is unlikely, however, that this state of affairs could actually exist in the absence of a world government. Discrimination against aliens is often very popular among the people already living in a country. Fears in the developed countries of an erosion in living standards or quality of life may add material self-interest to the more subjective feelings of cultural, racial, and religious differences which incline governments to discriminate against aliens. Even inside the U.S.there have been attempts to restrict free migration. During the Depression a California attempt to prevent movement into that state by poverty-stricken refugees from the draught in the middle of the country was only defeated by a decision of the U.S. Supreme Court. Footnote 1. The exceptional situation in Germany in the late 1980's was probably based on feelings of common nationhood rooted in history, language, culture, and a previous history of unified rule.
The absence of attitudes like these probably makes a world regime necessary if governmental discrimination against aliens is to be ended. But the same lack of fellow feeling will make a world government difficult to achieve and hard to preserve. Meanwhile, the right to control who may enter and live in a given territory will probably continue to be considered an essential and inherent characteristic of "sovereignty." As the U.S. Supreme Court said in Chae Chan Ping v. U.S. in 1888:
"That the government of the United States, through the action of the legislative department, can exclude aliens from its territory is a proposition which we do not think open to controversy. Jurisdiction over its own territory to that extent is an incident of every independent nation. It is a part of its independence. If it could not exclude aliens it would be to that extent subject to the control of another power. .... To preserve its independence, and give security against foreign aggressions and encroachment, is the highest duty of every nation, and to attain these ends nearly all other considerations are to be subordinated. It matters not in what form such aggression and encroachment come, whether from the foreign nation acting in its national character or from vast hordes of its people crowding in upon us." (Justice Field, writing for the Court.)
Principles aside, there are several important practical problems for which no adequate solutions can be found without a world government.
The first of these problems is how to define the boundaries between the world's various local political systems. This question is pregnant with mischief. Government's logic is the logic of involuntary associations, which are based on the power of the sword. Arguments that people have a right to choose the other people with whom they are to be involuntarily associated are absurd.
One of the most sacred cows of the twentieth century has been the so-called principle of the self-determination of peoples or nations. But governments do not respect this principle in dealing with their own subjects. The principle is invoked only selectively, to support the breakup of other political systems. Leadership of the secessionist republics in the recent breakup of the Soviet Union lost all enthusiasm for this principle when it was voiced by people who wanted to secede from them. Indeed, any general recognition of a right to secede would be incompatible with the very existence of government.
Assuming that a right to self-determination did exist, it would be necessary to decide which individuals belong to this or that "people" or nation. How and by whom could this be done? One possibility would be for each individual to decide for himself, but this has never seriously been proposed. Indeed, as we have seen, under today's international law the right to exclude undesired individuals is considered an inherent and self-evident right of every nation. So presumably decisions on inclusion and exclusion of individuals (as well as on where geographical boundary lines should be drawn between political jurisdictions) must be made collectively.
It is generally thought that collective political decisions should be made democratically. The present analysis enthusiastically agrees. But for the purpose of deciding who belongs to a group, the principle of majority decision cannot produce unequivocal answers. It is impossible to know whether a majority favors some decision until the membership of the group which is making that decision has been defined. A majority to be sure, but a majority of whom? For the purpose of deciding whether the people of Ohio are part of the American nation is the relevant electorate the people of Ohio, the people of the U.S. including Ohio, the people of the U.S. excluding Ohio? A local majority may be a tiny minority in a broader context. A minority may be a majority in a narrower context. If the context is debatable, indeed is the principal subject of the debate, everything is debatable!
In the actual world boundary disputes are rampant and always have been. Should Quebec be a part of Canada? Should Northern Ireland be a part of the United Kingdom, or of the Irish Republic? (Or independent? Or subdivided?!) Should Chechnya be a part of Russia? Should Kashmir be a part of India? What about Hong Kong? The Canal Zone? Kuwait? Israel? Puerto Rico? (The list could go on ad infinitum, ad nauseam.)
We have already met the same problem in the very different context of American labor law: the problem of determining the exact boundaries of a "bargaining unit." The National Labor Relations Act was written by people strongly committed to democracy. Thus, the law requires the decision whether to designate a sole bargaining agent to be made by voting. But the law does not provide that the establishment of the boundaries of the unit of workers to be represented will be determined by an election. A vote cannot determine who is to vote! This is the identical problem we now find at the world level in determining where to draw boundaries between different regional political systems.
American labor law authorizes the NLRB to conduct hearings, listen to arguments about which workers should be included in or excluded from the bargaining unit, and authoritatively decide where the boundaries will be. This "high-handed" approach gets the job done. A world government could provide exactly the same service with regard to disputed boundaries between different regional political systems, just as the U.S. Supreme Court resolves border disputes between the various states.
A world government empowered to decide authoritatively when borders are disputed or people seek to merge or disintegrate existing political entities would greatly reduce the importance of those borders. But borders would still have some importance, just as state boundaries still have some importance in the United States. When there is no world government, the greater importance of borders combined with a lack of principled ways to resolve disputes about them is a recipe for trouble.
Military security in an age of high technology represents a second practical problem which cannot be solved without a world government. On a planet with nearly two hundred independent governments, it is very unlikely that all of them will always be controlled by responsible, sane leaders. Power seems to attract certain kinds of unbalanced personalities, and acting as leaders may also push previously stable characters over the brink. It only takes one such leader to start a war.
As Norman Cousins saw so clearly during the first week of the atomic age, national defense is now impossible. Even the much debated Space Defense Initiative ("Star Wars") system would only prevent delivery of atomic warheads by intercontinental ballistic missile. There are many other ways to deliver atomic weapons to a target. Since there was no way to prevent attacks from succeeding, during the Cold War the great powers had to rest content with deterrence. Deterrence required weapon systems which could not all be knocked out by a surprise attack, so that remaining weapons could be used to blow the aggressor off the map. This "second strike capacity" created a situation known hopefully as MAD--Mutual Assured Destruction--which was not as crazy as it sounded. It did seem to work, as far as the U.S. and the Soviet Union were concerned, for nearly half a century.
Even if future technological developments unexpectedly restore a balance between means of attack and means of preventing the attack from succeeding, however, military methods of defense would still be intolerable if there is any better way of dealing with world-level conflicts.
In debates about the propriety of a particular war, those who support the war do not seem to generally appreciate the full implications of their arguments. The Vietnam War as it was debated within the U.S., for example, is an interesting case study in the relation between the morality of actions and the morality of circumstances.
A bad circumstance is one where we must take bad actions in order to get good results. To some extent we can shape future circumstances by our present actions. One thing we should ask ourselves before deciding what to do today is: what effect will this action have on the choices I will have to make tomorrow? Am I painting myself into a corner from which the only escape is immoral action?
The United States government took outrageous actions in Vietnam. Even the staunchest hawk would not have argued that all U.S. actions were inherently good. War, after all, is "hell." People get hurt and killed. Rather than trying to justify American actions in their own right, hawks instead made one or both of two other arguments: 1) The other side was taking even more outrageous actions. 2) Under the circumstances, the war was the least bad U.S. option.
North Vietnamese actions were certainly at least as outrageous as those of the U.S., but the first argument is not very strong. Bad actions by others do not automatically justify bad actions of ones own. In fact, calling actions bad implies that, everything else being equal, they ought not to be imitated.
The argument that bad U.S. actions were the best possible under the circumstances is much harder to criticize. Situations like this frequently occur. Whether or not this was actually the case in Vietnam is, of course, debatable. For the present discussion we will simply assume that U.S. actions in Vietnam really were the lesser evil, given the world circumstances which existed then.
Pro-war people did not seem to notice that, if U.S. actions in Vietnam were lesser evils under the circumstances, it was a very sad commentary on the circumstances. True, at any given time we must work within the circumstances that actually do exist, not those that we might wish existed. But when circumstances are that deplorable, failure to try to improve them over time becomes inexcusable.
During the Vietnam war (and today is no different) the world was an anarchy. There was no common government to resolve disputes between different areas by force of law rather than by force of arms. Under conditions of anarchy, appeal to the naked sword may indeed be justifiable. Not all justifiable wars are successful. But the more justifiable U.S. actions in Vietnam were under the circumstances, the more unjustifiable its failure to be doing anything--before or since--to end the world conditions in which such outrageous actions were warranted. Contemporary critics of U.S. involvement, like supporters, missed the fundamental issue.
A world without any conflict is impossible to imagine. So too is a world where sanctions (coercion, the threat of physical force) play no role in resolving conflict. The only choice is between the sanctions employed by law and those employed in war.
As we have seen, law draws a metaphorical line and warns that anybody who steps across it will suffer specific sanctions. Individuals can protect themselves from the sanctions by obeying the law. Those punished for violating a law are individually targeted based on actions for which they are personally responsible.
In war, on the other hand, sanctions are applied collectively rather than individually. Bombs rain down on the innocent as well as guilty. People cannot protect themselves from the violence of war by obeying the law. There is no relationship between personal guilt or responsibility and the violence to which one is subjected. Wars are like hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes, or floods: they hurt people rather randomly.
Law, clearly, is the best form of coercion. But the general benefits of law will not be available as long as the planet remains an anarchy and there is no government with jurisdiction over the entire population.
A third problem which is aggravated by the absence of a world government is poverty.
The vast sums spent to defend nation states are largely money down the drain. Military defense is one particular form of consumption. As such it is an alternative to other possible forms of consumption. And like all consumption, it is an alternative to investment, which in turn is a means of economic development. Relative overexpenditure on military forces may even lead, as Paul Kennedy has argued, to the decline of a country as a world power because of the concomitant failure to spend enough money in other needful directions.
In addition to the military spending necessitated by the absence of a world government, unbridled nationalism also reduces economic efficiency. Workers who are not free to move wherever in the world their value to employers would be maximized will not be as productive as they otherwise could be. Goods which are not allowed out of some countries or in to others are not as valuable as those which can be shipped wherever they are most in demand. National barriers to the movement of people, capital, goods, and even ideas hinder efficiency, limit economies of scale, and reduce the benefits of specialization in the world as a whole. Even the very conservative founder of the John Birch Society recognized this problem. As he wrote in the Blue Book:
An honestly intended federation of nations, in some later years or decades, for the legitimate purpose of increasing the freedom of individuals, goods, and cultures to cross national boundaries, and hence for the very purpose of decreasing governmental restrictions on individuals, is something we would support with all our hearts." Footnote 2.
Lack of a world government also encourages people to "solve" economic problems by pushing them out of sight into someone else's country. These strategies are morally equivalent to sweeping dirt not just under the carpet, but into a nearby room where it becomes someone else's dirt. The basic premise of this strategy is "foreigners don't count, foreigners don't hurt!"
It is always popular, for example, to try to export unemployment. In hard times, heartfelt letters to the editor urge that aliens be expelled and immigration cut off in order to reserve the "available jobs" for Americans (or Germans, or whoever). Sometimes the bias against foreigners is more subtle. When a labor union, for example, demands that foreign employers who compete with American firms pay their labor by U.S. standards, in effect they are asking the foreign employers and workers to give up the one advantage that may allow them to get any work to begin with. The unions' real complaint is the damage they think cheap competition is doing to their own standard of living, not the fact that their working brethren abroad are making less money. Karl Marx's famous proclamation that the workingman has no country appears, alas, to have been more wishful thinking than a description of reality.
Even a world government would need sufficient military forces to prevent secession. If massive secessionist violence makes it impossible to preserve order and unity by the normal procedures of law, military force is the only remaining option if the world government is to remain universal. However the armed forces necessary for a properly constituted world regime would be far less expensive than the aggregate costs of national defense when there is no such government. And of course such a government would guarantee the free movement of people, capital, goods, and ideas according to the dictates and opportunities of a market economy, thereby maximizing economic efficiency for the world as a whole.
The environment is a fourth major problem which cannot be adequately dealt with in a world with no central government.
It used to be assumed that ecological problems were primarily local in nature. Don't put that atomic power plant here! Don't site that chemical factory in our town! "Not in my back yard!" (NIMBY) Such thinking was akin to that of the sloppy housekeeper who sweeps dirt under the carpet. We are now beginning to realize that the basic environmental problem is not local, serious though that may be in specific places, but planet-wide. Air and water pay no attention to national borders. If there is a greenhouse effect then it is a problem for the entire world. Weather is everywhere. Likewise, the upper atmosphere ozone deficit, limited chiefly to Antarctica in the late 1980s, potentially could spread all over the place. The fluorocarbons believed to be depleting the ozone layer come from everywhere that there is refrigeration or airconditioning.
Pollution is also, of course, an economic problem. Environmental regulations increase production costs. If such regulations are enacted only by some countries, this gives a competitive advantage to firms located in countries which do not impose such high standards. Industrial growth will then take place mainly in these low-standard countries. Since the pollution ultimately will spread out from wherever it emanates, purely national regulations cannot do the job.
Without a world government, the best strategy is to negotiate multilateral treaties, with all signatories promising to enact tough pollution controls. If such treaties are signed by all countries and if all signatories abide by their promises, this approach will do the job. But both "ifs" are very big ones, and negotiating and administering such treaties incurs very large transaction costs.
Ultimately a world government is the only organization which could afford to impose tough, meaningful regulations to protect the earth's atmosphere, oceans, and biosphere. Only a world government could be sure that the rules would be enforced everywhere, thus giving no areas an advantage or a disadvantage, and holding the transaction costs down to a minimum. And only a world government could impose effective limits on expansion of the population, the other side of the ecological problem. The more people, the more need for goods and services and the more pressure placed on the carrying capacity of the world environment. Nobody knows how many people the world can decently support. The answer will change from time to time as technology changes. But at any one point in time, the number is clearly finite.
The fifth goal that cannot be achieved without world government is to effectively regulate multinational corporations. American experience in the nineteenth century provides an instructive analogy. As nationwide corporations developed, it proved impossible for state governments to regulate them. If one state cracked down, corporations shifted operations towards other states where the business climate was more favorable. States could not afford to scare away tax base and employment opportunities for their residents and were therefore unable to come to grips with the new corporations.
Towards the end of the nineteenth century the federal government began to step into the regulatory vacuum. National regulations applied everywhere and did not put specific locations at a disadvantage. Political support could therefore be gotten for measures at the national level which were politically impossible at the state and local level.
The solution used in the U.S. to regulate nation-wide corporations is not presently available in the world to regulate world-wide corporations. It might be possible to negotiate multilateral treaties under which all signatory governments pledge to impose given regulations on corporations operating within their jurisdiction. But as with similar possible treaties to protect the environment, the problems posed by holdouts and by very high transaction costs make this route a very doubtful one except in the most extreme cases of immediate necessity. A similar alternative existed and exists inside the United States. Under the Constitution, states have the right to negotiate treaties ("interstate compacts") among themselves, subject to Congressional consent. The fact that there was never any particular effort to take this alternate path to regulating nationwide corporations suggests that it is not a serious possibility. Nor is it likely to be at the world level, either.
It is therefore safe to predict that as long as there is no world government, the multinational corporations will remain free to manipulate nation states to their own advantage. There is nothing inherently wrong with this, since the pursuit of advantage is what drives market economies and market economies are the only kind which work even moderately well. However when the multinationals are allowed to run loose, they may sometimes act in ways which are to the general disadvantage, and the inability to regulate them may be very troublesome.
It would be surprising if a world government produced nothing but advantages. Human affairs usually are not like that. We do not often enjoy the luxury of choosing between good and bad, or even between good and greater good. We often have to choose between an action producing bad results and one producing even worse results. Actions taken to achieve a desired goal usually will also produce some undesired side effects or costs. Hence, we speak of decision-making in terms of "cost-benefit analysis."
If a world government went "bad," there would be no place to escape from it to. There would be no foreign governments with the ability or interest to make trouble for such a government, to give aid and comfort to those resisting it, to help to bring it down. To the extent that the world government reduces differences between different parts of the world, the opportunities for innovation and progress made possible by variety are also reduced. A great deal of technological progress has been stimulated by the imperatives of military defense against aggression from neighboring countries, and this motivation for research and development would disappear under a universal regime.
The advantages of "redundancy" and "compartmentalization" may be just as real in social systems as they are in ships and other large and complicated machines. An airplane which crashes if even one transistor in its computer fails would be a very poor example of engineering design work. Modern airliners are built so that if one part fails, others will still be able to do the job. There are always at least two engines and there are backup systems for controlling the steering and flap systems and for lowering the landing gear. There are always at least two pilots on board in case one of them suddenly dies or becomes incapacitated. Ships are designed according to similar principles, with many separate watertight compartments in their hulls rather than one single space which could sink the ship if it were breached.
The nation-state system arguably provides similar protection for the long-term survival of the human race. By impeding the movement of people from one country to another, the present system slows down international propagation of the potentially catastrophic new diseases which can emerge unexpectedly. Ability to cope with a new disease may depend on existence of sufficient time to develop a cure, a vaccine, or a treatment. The extra time allowed by the separation of the planet into relatively impermeable countries could make a big difference.
A nation-state system also provides some protection against the opposite problem: overpopulation. If sexual practices in a particular country lead to overcrowding in that country, at least the human race can go on elsewhere. The legally and morally abominable concept of an "illegal alien" here may help to protect the entire human race from overbreeding itself into hopeless poverty, it may allow countries where population is not exploding to protect themselves from infusions of people who operate on other principles.
These possible disadvantages of a world government are indeed worth thinking about. We must also remember that although the Metaconstitution requires a universal government, not all universal governments would satisfy the other requirements of the Metaconstitution. An ideal government must not merely be universal. It must also be democratic, it must respect the rule of law, natural resources must be publicly owned, and markets must be allowed to function.
A world government might be able to find strategies to reduce the costs otherwise forthcoming from a lack of compartmentalization in the world. In chapter 7 we will consider the possiblity of regulating the right to reproduce in order to prevent population increases which destroy the carrying capacity of the world environment. Some additional methods of minimizing the harm done by the lack of compartmentalization will be discussed in chapter 10. In any event, the fact that an action has costs is not determinative one way or the other. Nor is the fact that a proposed action has benefits. The real question is what is the ratio between the costs and the benefits, and what are the costs (and benefits) of alternative possible actions. "There ain't no such thing as a free lunch!" (TANSTAAFL) Serious social analysis cannot afford superficiality when tough choices must be made. If there were easy solutions to the human predicament, we would long since have discovered and implemented them.
A world government would come into sharp conflict with attitudes which are widely and deeply distributed in most of today's world. A world government established in spite of these attitudes could not perpetuate itself merely by enforcing laws against efforts to foment secession.. Laws can only be enforced when community sentiments incline the vast majority of people to comply without having the gun pointed directly at their heads. No government can afford to fine, imprison, or execute more than a tiny minority of the population if it needs to win an election.
Flourishing secession movements can only be defeated by acts of war, sanctions directed collectively rather than against responsible individuals, because it is not possible to pinpoint personal responsibility in such movements. But a successful world government would have to keep such acts of war to an absolute minimum. Major changes in prevailing political attitudes will therefore be necessary before we can establish a world government which satisfies the other requirements of the Metaconstitution: democracy, the rule of law, and economic markets. We will wait until chapter 9 to discuss how we might persuade people to support a world government. For now, we will analyze the attitudes which stand in the way of a world government and explain why they are perverse.
The number of different ways that we can think about ourselves as individuals is truly legion. Our "identity" appears to be bound up to a great extent with the types of people with whom we identify. Thus, I may "see myself" in one or more of the following categories of people":
black person white person
man woman
Protestant Catholic
Moslem Christian
citizen foreigner
Republican Democrat
heterosexual homosexual
anti-Communist Communist
Oregonian Michigander
doctor lawyer
...or Indian chief.
It is all too easy to say, "I am a ...." and then fill in the blank with one of the above or a similar classification. Some of these categories are almost impossible to see as our central, defining characteristic: Republican, for example, or lawyer. (However we have all known a few people who may have considered being a Republican, or Democrat, as the most important thing in life. Recently there was a lonely hearts ad in an Ann Arbor monthly which concluded with the words, "No Republicans, please"! De gustabis non disputandam.) Other categories, however, at some times and places have been taken very seriously by large numbers of people.
The alternative to the above way of thinking is to say something along the following lines: I am a human being, who happens to be male, black, Catholic, currently living in Oklahoma ...., etc. It is hard to feel empathy with people with whom we cannot identify (i.e., see something that we have in common.) Therefore,if we think of ourselves fundamentally at any level lower than "human being," this automatically makes empathy with some (probably a great many) other human beings more unlikely, more difficult, perhaps even impossible.
Such things as gender, race, religion, culture, living style, and economic specialization are empathy-reducers to the extent they are taken seriously and seen as central to our "identify." Even stronger barriers to empathy are location in time, location in space, and language. It is very hard to feel empathy with the people of ancient Greece or with the residents of Colorado in the year 2916. It is hard enough maintain fellow feelings with individuals of a very different age from ourselves even when our lives overlap in time and we can come into personal contact. (This is sometimes called the "generation gap.") Yet we were all young once, and we can all imagine that we may someday be very old.
Geographical distance is also a strong obstacle to empathy. It is natural to have more personal attachment to those in our immediate vicinity than to people half a planet or more away whom we may never even have met.
Perhaps the biggest obstacle to empathy and perception of a common humanity is social distance due to language differences. Looking around today's world, we cannot fail to be struck by the continuing relevance of the Biblical story of the Tower of Babel. Language problems are absolutely ubiquitous, if not indeed an important growth industry. The "official English language" issue keeps popping up in the U.S. Canada shows continuing signs of coming apart at the seams over conflicts between French and English elements of the population. The Soviet Union, no doubt rather badly named, turned into a morass of ethnic and language- based schisms. Other major powers including China and India suffer from conflicts in which the parties are lined up along linguistic lines.
Even inside countries enjoying a common language obstacles to communication and empathy are created by the growing specialization in economic production roles. Each major profession has its own special interests and issues which are reflected and expressed in a specialized vocabulary that is not accessible to people not engaged in that specialty. New dialects or even new languages, as it were, are constantly growing up inside existing languages.
Lack of empathy makes it easier to write other people off and to treat them as complete "externalities" in our cost-benefit calculations. All actions, of course, produce some combination of costs and benefits. If all costs as well as benefits accrue to the individual taking a particular action, it is rational for that individual to take the action, of all those possible, which produces the best results in terms of cost-benefit analysis. Some actions, however, produce benefits for the actor and costs for other people. If the other people do not count for anything in the thinking of the actor, the actor need not consider costs at all. But action without considering costs is the epitome of irresponsibility.
The problem of "externalized costs" is a familiar one to economists and environmentalists. But "externalized costs" is too abstract to convey the full alarming implications of the attitudes involved. Translated to the concrete level, these attitudes may boil down to such pithy epigrams as:
"black people don't count"
"South Americans don't count"
"out of sight, out of mind."
For people who think this way, it makes perfect sense to object to a multinational corporation moving a factory from a highly developed country like the U.S. or Germany to a "less developed" (i.e. poor) country like Mexico or India because it will "cost jobs." Since demand for labor at the lower wages of the less developed countries will be higher, such moves probably increase net worldwide employment. Only when one assumes that the jobs lost in the U.S. or Germany are the only thing that matters and that Mexicans or Indians don't count can one talk this way with a straight face. But it is done all the time!
It is not enough to lament these attitudes. We must try to understand their psychological and moral foundations. The point of view in question is not totally perverse. It consists of natural feelings and correct ideas that have been applied outside way the arena where they are appropriate.
Human life is basically a very small scale or "micro" affair. Everybody is an individual, and we all have personal contacts with a very limited number of other people. As the breadth of our contacts with others increases, the average depth of those relationships decreases, because each of us has a very limited capability to interact with others. We all work within a time limit: days of finite length, lives of finite length. Communicating and interacting with others takes time, and time spent in relations with one person thereby becomes unavailable for similar contact with other people. As a result, and perfectly naturally, our interest in and concern for other people is extremely selective. "Blood is thicker than water," as the old saying goes. We are naturally more concerned for the individuals with whom we have become acquainted and developed bonds of affection than we are for total strangers or "mere" acquaintances.
The quality of our lives is determined primarily by our micro-relationships with the family and friends with whom we are deeply involved. Politics and other large-scale, "macro," institutions are only of secondary importance; they are properly seen by most people as mere means to the more important ends of life. It is hard for politicians, professors, and social activists to understand this, because their professional focus is on the aggregate, macro level of life. It seems to them (and to many others who do not reflect very deeply on their own feelings) that large scale relationships, because they involve millions or billions of people, must inherently be more important than small scale relations. But most people (including these self-same politicians and professors) invariably act as if this is not true.
Although politics is vitally significant , it is never of ultimate importance. Like the heart whose beat is necessary for the individual to continue living, a failure at the political level can have fatal consequences. Decent people will, therefore, do well to take an active interest in politics rather than abandoning it to scoundrels. But politics is also like the heart in that as long as it is functioning adequately it is not the most important thing in the lives of individuals.
It is impossible to develop a well-balanced perspective on life and self if we assume that the large-scale (macro) is more important than the small-scale (micro) in the physical and social universes. We must resist the notion that large groups are more important humanly than small groups.
The broad perspective taken by political leaders, who must deal with large numbers of people, is a legitimate and necessary one. In calling for a government of laws and not of men, we are saying that government should treat individuals impersonally, Similar cases should be treated similarly, without regard for the personal connections of the individuals involved. The high officials of a government think big, and this is good. It is important for somebody to be concerned with the overall picture. It is important for somebody in the Federal Aviation Agency, for example, to feel satisfaction if fatalities from plane accidents are cut from 1.5 to 1.1 persons per 400,000,000 passenger-miles and to work to try to make air travel still safer.
Thinking big is necessary and desirable. It is also dangerous in the same way that a medicine that is beneficial when properly used can be deadly under other circumstances. Daniel Burnham once said: "Make no little plans; they have no magic to stir men's blood." But W.A. Orton has noted the danger of big plans:
"Once you start working backward from abstractly conceived ends to the policies and problems of actuality, there is no telling to what enormities your logic may drive you. Rationalism of the a priori type always ends by being inhumane and antidemocratic, because it can see nothing in the folkways and traditions of ordinary people except obscurantism. They get in the way of the ideal scheme, and that becomes a sufficient excuse for impersonal harshness and well-intentioned brutality." Footnote 3.
And George Kennan puts it to us bluntly:
"I have seen more harm done in this world by those who tried to storm the bastions of society in the name of utopian beliefs, who were determined to achieve the elimination of all evil and the realization of the millennium within their own time, than by all the humble efforts of those who have tried to create a little order and civility and affection within their own intimate entourage, even at the cost of tolerating a great deal of evil in the public domain." Footnote 4.
To keep a sense of proportion, we need to devote a fair amount of time to "thinking little." We need to remember what lies behind the abstractions whose use we find so necessary and convenient. As Bishop Richard Emrich has said:
"In an age of vast organization, stupendous budgets, and great impersonal forces, it is easy to forget that human character and honor must always stand at the center of our concern.... History reveals that most calamities and disasters are caused by the vices, arrogance, and stupidity of human [individuals]...." Footnote 5.
We need also to remember that politics is basically a means to more important ends. Government provides (at best) the framework of stability and security within which the personal life of the individual-among-friends is possible. But government does not and cannot make the good life inevitable. Some people still could and would be miserable even in the best of all possible societies. Politics, like the heart, must be regarded as vital, but not as all-important, if we are to keep things in perspective.
Finally, we need to remember that in large scale human relations justice and not love is probably the ultimate value (although large scale relationships are not themselves ultimate), and that people claiming to love humanity in general (rather than respecting it) are probably deceiving themselves if they are not indeed lying. A parable along these lines is presented in Dostoevsky's Brothers Karamazov. Father Zosima is speaking:
"It's just the same story as a doctor once told me.... `I love humanity,' he said, `but I wonder at myself. The more I love humanity in general, the less I love man in particular, that is, as separate individuals.... I become hostile to people the moment they come close to me. But it has always happened that the more I detest men individually the more ardent becomes my love for humanity in general.'" Footnote 6.
Nationalism, the idea that one's ultimate political loyalty should be devoted to a nation-state rather than some more universal government, rests on the notion that the small and intimate is more important than the large and impersonal. As we have just seen this notion is undoubtedly true, but under modern conditions it does not in fact call for nationalism.
Nation-states, even the most tiny members of the United Nations, are still far too big to be considered organic groups of the kind in which daily life goes on. When there is a conflict between the interests of a nation-state and of a family, the loyalty to the family will prevail nine times out of ten if there is enough freedom in society to allow this. It was perfectly natural that the families of hostages held by Iran in 1980 or Iraq in 1990 put the welfare of their loved ones ahead of the national interest. Most people's ultimate loyalty is and always will be to their "little platoon," to the relatively small numbers of discrete individuals whom they love. The nation-state can never replace this little platoon as the locus of human loyalties and affections. It is far too big.
At the macro-level, on the other hand, the nation-state is now far too small and particularistic to be the repository of our ultimate political (as distinguished from human) loyalties. The nation-state can no longer adequately create and protect conditions within which real life (micro-relationships) can go on with minimum disruption. The nation-state cannot protect its people against military annihilation. It cannot protect its people against destruction of the carrying capacity of the planetary ecology. Our constant highest human loyalties to our little platoon now require us to readjust our attitudes regarding where our ultimate political loyalties should lie. Politics is an arena of means to more important ends. If giving our ultimate political loyalty to a world government would promote our human and personal values more effectively than present arrangements do, if rising above nationalism will improve our lives, then this is what we should do.
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1. Edwards v. California. 314 U.S. 160 (1941). 130 U.S. 581 (1888)
2. Robert Welch, The Blue Book of the John Birch Society (Published by the author, 1961), p. 163.
3. W.A. Orton, The Liberal Tradition (New Haven: Yale U. Press, 1945), p. 27.
4. George Kennan, Democracy and the Student Left (Boston: Little, Brown, 1968), p. 9.
5. Detroit News, January 17, 1965.
6. Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov (N.Y: Heritage Press, 1960), p. 40.