Copyright © 1998 by Paul F. deLespinasse, Adrian College
For details of generous permission to copy or
link, click here.
Document may not print if you have not
clicked here first.
Footnotes are at the end of the chapter.
"There lived a king, as I've been told
in the wonder-working days of old,
when hearts were twice as good as gold
and twenty times as mellow.
Good temper triumphed in his face,
and in his heart he found a place
for all the erring human race
and every wretched fellow.
He wished all men as rich as he
(and he was rich as rich could be)
so to the top of every tree
promoted everybody.
Now that's the kind of king for me ...."
Gilbert and Sullivan, The Gondoliers
Nobody thinks today's world is perfect. Everybody agrees that things ought to be different. But agreement does not extend to the details. Some want to change this, others to change that. Some want to change things in one direction while others want change in some other direction, perhaps even the opposite direction. Change is difficult because we do not agree on what should be changed and we do not agree on how it should be changed.
Change will occur even if there are no deliberate efforts to bring it about, but it will be in the form of drift. Since not all changes are improvements, drift is just as likely to be towards a worsened total state of affairs as it is to be towards an better world. Indeed drift is actually more likely to be in the wrong direction, since there are so many possible directions and only one of them is the right one. To use a simple analogy, if we ought to be going west, but we randomly pick a direction from the set [east, west, north, south] there is only one chance in four we will end up traveling west.
Deliberate efforts to improve the world are impossible unless we have some idea of what a better world would be like. We need to know where we want to go before we can figure out how to get there.
Marxist socialism provided a vision of an ideal society that inspired large numbers of people in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The socialist vision proclaimed the ideal of a classless society, a society without a privileged class of people. However the socialist vision has now been destroyed by sad experience. By the beginning of the twentieth century's last decade, Soviet leaders were admitting in the pages of Pravda that the horrors of Stalinism were no accident, that in fact they were the inevitable results of trying to put the Marxist vision into practice At the end of the century, more and more people, especially in the erstwhile Communist countries, saw Marxism as a false map which leads its followers into political, economic, and social blind alleys.
Notwithstanding the collapse of the Communist regimes and the Marxist vision, however, a classless society still has considerable appeal to many people. Fortunately, the classless society need not be a monopoly of Marxists or socialists. There are two possible approaches to the classless society, as Marx himself once backhandedly admitted, and only one of the approaches, the Marxist one, has been tried out.
According to Marx, by the nineteenth century the previously complex structure of European society had simplified itself so that only two basic classes remained: the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. The bourgeoisie were the capitalists, the owners of the factories which were the dominant form of productive property under capitalism. The proletariat was the working class, the class made up of people who did not own any productive property and were therefore forced to earn a living by selling their labor.
The Marxist route to a classless society was straightforward: The proletariat must seize political power by revolutionary means. There would still be two classes after the revolution, but the tables would be turned and the proletariat rather than the bourgeoisie would now be on top. There would be, temporarily, a "dictatorship of the proletariat," replacing the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie in terms of which Marx portrayed the existing societies. Gradually, the bourgeoisie would be "liquidated." It is not clear whether the "liquidation" referred to physical extermination or simply to absorption of members of the bourgeoisie as individuals into the ranks of the proletariat.
In any event, according to Marxism, by the end of the transitional ("socialist") period the bourgeoisie will be entirely liquidated as a class. All that remains will be the proletariat. But it is logically impossible for there to be one class. To have classes, there must be more than one. Hence when the bourgeoisie has disappeared, what remains is not a 1-class society, but a no-class society. It is a classless society. And since Marx defined the state as merely a tool used by a ruling class to exploit another class or classes, the classless society will also be stateless. Marxists thus speak of the "withering away of the state." "Communism," the Marxist "final" stage, is both stateless and classless.
By Marx's own logic, a classless society results when one of two existing classes disappears. But this means that in theory, at least, it is possible to achieve the classless society by liquidating the proletariat as a class. If this could be done, so that the only remaining class was the bourgeoisie, then the resulting society would be just as classless as one where the bourgeoisie had been liquidated. Marx himself saw this logical possibility, since he referred sarcastically in the Communist Manifesto to a society in which there would be "a bourgeoisie without a proletariat," but he did not take the idea seriously. It is my thesis, however, that this alternate conception of a classless society does have practical possibilities. The bourgeois perspective on a classless society suggests very different arrangements and institutions than does the proletarian perspective. And the bourgeois vision of the classless society suggests radically different techniques for bringing it into existence. Efforts to achieve the proletarian vision by Marxist methods have been discredited. But this fact has no bearing on the prospects for future efforts to implement the Metaconstitutional, bourgeois, vision of the classless society.
If it can be demonstrated that a properly-conceived classless society is an appropriate goal for idealistic members of the bourgeoisie, that it would be an expression of a great many essentially middle class values, then perhaps it will be possible to achieve a general social consensus--uniting all classes--that creating such a society would be mutually beneficial. To the extent such a consensus can be forged, it will go a long ways towards making achievement of such a world politically feasible.
The central focus of the Marxist perspective is on the economic class. Particular individuals are seen as mere embodiments or representatives of the interests of a class. From the bourgeois, middle class point of view, however, the basic reality is the individual, and classes are merely sets of those individuals who have something in common with each other. However the bourgeois perspective does not visualize a society made up of isolated individuals, but rather one of individuals who are associated with each other in a wide variety of ways. From the bourgeois point of view, the most important social institution is the family.
It is instructive to compare middle class respect for family with the contrasting attitudes both of the upper classes (aristocracy, royalty, elites in general) and of the lower class (proletariat). Aristocrats have long been inclined to marriages of convenience, with the resulting emotional vacuum partially filled by mistresses and extramarital love affairs. To the extent that the upper classes have managed to remain monogamous, it has often been a "serial monogamy," with repeated divorces and remarriages. The children of the aristocracy have tended to be neglected by their parents and brought up by professional nannies and tutors. The parents have always had more "important" things to do.
The aristocratic mentality has not been very fond of the previous generation in the family, either. After all, the present generation does not get the family titles, money, or power until the previous generation has died off. Resentment that death has not happened sooner not uncommonly evokes efforts to help nature along. Perhaps fear that the next generation will see things the same way partly accounts for the distance aristocratic parents keep from their children.
The family has also been a very weak institution in the lower classes. Proletarians, too, often neglect their children. Divorces and abandoned mates have been common, "single parents" have abounded, illegitimate births have been frequent.
The shrinking middle class in western societies is closely connected with the crisis of the family. The divorce rate reflects the crisis of the bourgeoisie. The more extreme members of the women's liberation movement have been explicitly anti-family. Even the more moderate elements of women's liberation doctrine appear to have anti-family implications. One example: the idea that significant activity always takes place outside the family for monetary compensation, while the nurturing of children is an unimportant and unrewarding task delegable to low-paid "professionals."
The middle class is disposed to take the future seriously and to invest in it. People who invest postpone current satisfactions in order to create a better tomorrow, either for themselves, or for their descendants. Capital formation is one aspect of investment, perhaps the aspect for which the bourgeoisie has been best known. But education is another important type of investment. It too rests on essentially middle class foundations. As the middle class is squeezed, we would expect therefore to have a crisis of the schools. And in fact, we do. For whatever reason, lower class people are unwilling to wait. They want things now. They overextend themselves to buy consumer goods on credit. They produce children without having the ability to support them, financially or emotionally. They find schooling to be irrelevant and drop out. They use drugs that promise short-term "happiness" and long-term disaster.
But it wasn't a proletarian who uttered the most famous example of words which brushed off the future: "After us, the deluge!" It was a French king. The aristocracy has not only failed to take family life seriously, it has failed to take the future seriously. The modern drug culture is shared by the lower and upper classes. Horror at the implications of the short- sighted drug culture and support for the perhaps ill-advised efforts to conduct a "war" on drugs appear to be rooted in the declining middle class.
The middle class, bourgeois view of the family as the central institution of society is an expression of foresight,of generativity, and of respect for life, past, present, and future. The family is intergenerational, made up of parents, children, and grandchildren. Respect and affection for parents is a respect for the past. Respect and concern for children is a respect for the future. How can people who do not respect the ancestors from whom they sprang take themselves seriously? How can people who do not respect the children they have produced take themselves, the soil on which these children grew, seriously?
With its perception of the family as the central social institution, the middle class inevitably views the political system as a secondary thing. Bigger formations in society are not automatically viewed as better or more important than smaller ones.
Families are always small. A large family is not just difficult, but impossible. One may find families that are large by family standards, but even such a large family is miniscule compared with the scale commonly attained by corporations, churches, political parties, labor unions, universities, and armies.
The necessary smallness of the family is closely connected with its other distinctive characteristic. It belongs to the type of association which sociologists call gemeinschaft. A gemeinschaft is a relationship between people that is valued primarily for its own sake and not as a means to any further purposes. All even moderately large-scale associations are, by way of contrast, gesellschaft rather than gemeinschaft. A gesellschaft is a relationship between individuals that is regarded primarily as a means to other, more important ends. Political system are always gesellschaft to their very core. The smallest city-states are huge compared with the largest possible family.
Politics is not the central core of life for any sane person. The bourgeois belief that the family rather than the state is the most important social institution is therefore quite sound. We confront one another face to face and live the significant social portions of our lives in very small groups. More inclusive levels of social organization are needed in order to make possible a continuation of the gemeinschaft's fundamental personal relations with a minimum of disruptions from others. The state is thus a setting for life, not the essence or epitome of life. The state exists only as a means to the private ends of individuals; the individual does not exist as a means to the glory of the state. Politics is vital, but never of ultimate importance. Like the heart in the human body, whose beat is necessary for the individual to continue living, a failure at the political level can have fatal consequences. Decent people are well-advised to be interested and involved 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 people's lives.
Extremism is very unbourgeois. Extremists of many persuasions--the John Bircher and the Maoist, for example--think that politics is of ultimate significance and that if the political order is defective, a decent life is absolutely impossible. Politics becomes their religion. Thus Mao Tse-tung said,"Not having a correct political outlook is like having no soul." Footnote 1. And the totalitarian philosopher Herbert Marcuse characteristically charged that the American political system "isolates the individual from the one dimension where he could `find himself': from his political existence, which is at the core [!] of his entire existence."Footnote 2.
Just as it supported national unification movements in the past, the middle class will support a world government when it sees that it will provide an environment where families can be nurtured and protected better than under the present conditions of world anarchy.
The proletarian appears to see others of his sort principally as dangerous rivals in the competition for "jobs." Although there is a certain mutual affinity based on shared socio-economic characteristics, what Durkheim called "organic solidarity", there is little of the "mechanical" solidarity which is based on mutual interests. Fear and hatred of other members of the working class have been all too common. To be called a "scab" in working class circles is very strong language. A scab is someone who replaces you while you are on strike, who steals your job. Working people have often supported movements opposed to immigration and immigrants. Immigrants, allegedly willing to work for less, steal jobs from the people who really ought to count, the people already living in a certain location. Jurisdictional disputes about which group of employees has the right to do certain kinds of work have also been very important.
Contrary to Marxist pipe-dreaming, there is and can be no true solidarity of the proletariat. Economically, the interests of workers as workers are in basic conflict. If half of the people in my own line of work (college professor) were to die of some plague this afternoon, demand for our services not being affected, those of us still alive could command better wages tomorrow. If supply of workers is down and demand remains constant, the market price of our services will increase. In the absence of such a plague, my fellow workers who remain alive are objectively my economic enemies. (See also chapter 5.)
The effect of this economic conflict is reduced or even reversed by specialization. Competition for jobs I cannot do has no bearing on my earning power and may help keep down the costs of producing of goods and services I want to buy. But specialization also increases the differences between different parts of the proletariat and undermines any tendencies to solidarity based, not on shared economic interests, but on empathy growing out of social similarities.
The proletarian is inclined to pull down or keep down his fellow proletarians. It is not just rich capitalists who arouse his jealousy. The proletarian sees himself primarily as a producer rather than in his equally important role as a consumer of goods and services produced by other workers.
The middle class person sees other middle class people more as potential customers than as rivals. The more successful they are, the better customers they will make for the goods or services that you produce. The bourgeois person does not appreciate losing business to a competitor, but his predominant motive is to improve his own lot, not to keep others down. If people lower than oneself on the economic ladder pull themselves up, this is welcomed. The middle class has no interest in seeing people kept down, or held down, or pulled down.
The proletarian sees total production as a constant. If one person's income rises, the proletarian assumes that someone else will have a corresponding decrease. The rich are rich at the expense of the poor. Poverty can only be eliminated by impoverishing the rich. Proletarian logic is the logic of the zero-sum game.
The bourgeois point of view here stands in stark contrast to the proletarian. Everybody can be better off. The total number of jobs can grow. . The middle class person does not see economics as a zero-sum game. Since economic relations are voluntary associations created by the mutual consent of their parties, mutual benefit is assumed. Exchange relations are not zero-sum. Gains on one side are not cancelled out by equal losses on the other side. Rather, both sides to the exchange stand to gain. If Jones places a higher value on pears than on applies, and Smith places a higher value on apples than on pears, both Jones and Smith consider themselves better off after an exchange. Exchange based on mutual consent is a positive-sum game.
The proletarian assumes that a different approach to "distributing" goods and services among consumers will have no consequences whatever for the total amount that is produced. Society's ability to "redistribute" good things so as to benefit the poor is therefore regarded as unlimited. But in a market economy where voluntary associations are the norm, the right to consume goods and services is the inducement which motivates people to produce those very goods and services. If the right to consume a certain amount does not depend on participation in the production process, if one lives just as well whether one works or does not work, people will tend not to work. But it is impossible to redistribute or to consume goods and services that have not been produced in the first place.
The Marxist approach to a classless society is congenial to the proletarian mentality and the Metaconstitutional approach to such a society should be equally congenial to the middle class. Marxists wanted to pull the bourgeoisie down and to make the whole world into one big happy family. The first goal was perfectly achievable but disastrous in fact. As we will see shortly, the second goal was quite impossible. The Metaconstitutional classless society will be achieved by pulling the proletariat up into the ranks of the bourgeoisie, and by creating a world in which a multitude of families can flourish.
One fact about any possible classless society is perfectly clear and must be honestly confronted: it cannot be one where everybody is alike in all conceivable ways. Such a society is not merely undesirable; it is inconceivable. There will always be important differences between the various individuals who make up a society.
The list of ways in which individuals differ from one another in today's world is a long one:
sex
race
age
language
nationality
educational level
intelligence
specialization
market value of labor
organizational location (Which
organization? Which office?)
ownership
connections ("know-who")
religion
life experience
The list, although incomplete, includes many of the leading ways individuals can be classified into different categories.
Some items on this list conceivably could be eliminated. Racial differences might be eliminated either by a compulsory computer-controlled inter-breeding process lasting many generations, or by a race war in which members of one race succeeded in killing off all other races. It is not inconceivable that all people might someday speak the same language, or that powerful computerized translators could allow everybody to communicate with anybody regardless of language differences. However there are also elements on the list that could not even conceivably be eliminated from human life. The physical differences between men and women, for example, will remain a continuing feature of future societies. A society in which all of the men or all of the women had been killed off could theoretically exist, but it would be a terminal society, not an ongoing one.
Another differentiating factor that could never be eliminated would be age. A society where everybody was the same age could have no children, and a society which has no children has no future. It is, of course, possible to have sub-societies in which everybody is the same age, or the same sex, or the same race. But then differences in the sub-societies to which one belongs would remain a basis on which individuals might be classified.
The proletarian or "organic" concept of social solidarity, in which everybody is the same, is therefore not a possible basis for a classless society. Even when one basis for differentiating people is artificially suppressed, others will pop up, as the Yugoslavian writer Milovan Djilas pointed out in his book The New Class. Djilas, who had been Vice President of Yugoslavia and knew what he was talking about, so enraged the Communist authorities (whose members constituted the new ruling class he was writing about!) that he spent several years in jail.
The bourgeois vision of the classless society does not view its citizens as interchangeable non-entities. The fact that citizens have differences which allow them to be classified does not mean that one necessarily has a class society. After all, differences between people include differences in ideas and opinions, and the dangers of trying to eliminate these have been known for a long time. As James Madison put it, two hundred years ago:
"There are ... two methods of removing the causes of faction. The one, by destroying the liberty which is essential to its existence; the other, by giving to each citizen the same opinions, the same passions, and the same interests. It could never be more truly said, that of the first remedy, that it was worse than the disease. Liberty is to faction what air is to fire, an aliment, without which it instantly expires. But it would not be less a folly to abolish liberty, which is essential to political life, because it nourishes faction, than it would be to wish the annihilation of air, because it imparts to fire its destructive agency. The second expedient is as impracticable, as the first would be unwise. As long as the reason of man continues fallible, and he is at liberty to exercise it, different opinions will be formed."
In Durkheim's terms, a conceivable classless society will have to be based on "mechanical" rather than "organic" solidarity. Organic solidarity presumes that people are the same in all respects that they consider important, which is impossible except perhaps in very tiny voluntary associations. Even the family, where solidarity is potentially at a maximum, consists of individuals who differ from one another in many important respects.
Mechanical solidarity, in contrast, presumes variety. Everybody benefits from this variety if the differences among people can be put to constructive use rather than causing mutual suspicion, hatred, and refusals to associate. Because people are different, some are better at doing one kind of thing, others at doing other kinds of things. Some people find satisfaction in doing this, others in doing that. These facts provide a natural basis for specialization in production, which in turn immensely increases the quantity and quality of the goods and services produced.
All consumers benefit from the fact that different people specialize in producing different kinds of things. Workers also benefit from specialization, which potentially allows choice of production specialties in accordance with personal tastes and values. One of the many bad characteristics of a military draft is that it makes no allowances for the aptitudes, values, and tastes of the individuals who are compelled--at the point of the sword--to serve in the army. The right to declare oneself a "conscientious objector" is not always included, and at best provides protection only in extreme cases. An all-volunteer army, by contrast, need not provide for conscientious objection, since each individual can take conscience into account when deciding whether to volunteer.
Of course there is a down-side to specialization in addition to benefits. Some kinds of socially-necessary work (cleaning sewers, preparing income tax returns, etc.) are unpleasant, and others (coal-mining, police, military service, etc) are relatively dangerous. Many other jobs which are not especially dangerous or unpleasant may be very boring and have few attractive qualities other than the paycheck. The pattern of employment opportunities which exists, the number of jobs doing this and doing that, will depend mainly on consumer demand. Jobs exist to produce goods and services that other people are willing and able to pay for, not to offer intrinsic satisfaction (satisfaction above and beyond the paycheck) to the people who produce those goods and services.
People may therefore have to chose between employment which maximizes their income (and thus their ability to consume) and employment where the work itself is more enjoyable. One may have to chose between being a high paid insurance company executive or being a free lance composer of "far-out" serious music (which has little market) and living thereby at a near-starvation level. Such choices are never pleasant. But it is better to decide on the necessary tradeoffs ourselves than to have somebody else do it for us. At least, as noted in chapter 5, it may be possible to combine a lucrative but not very interesting job with a more meaningful but not very lucrative avocation.
The mechanical solidarity of a classless society will not be achieved by making the entire world into one big happy family, as Marx apparently wanted to do. The Marxist ideal was summed up in the slogan, "From each according to his ability; to each, according to his needs." This is an exact description of the economic principles of a family. People in a family do not consume in proportion to their personal production or earnings. The young children in particular, produce and earn nothing, but their basic needs are supplied by their parents, who thereby are consuming less than they earn. One does not keep "books" for purposes of economic transactions internal to the family, except perhaps as a way of educating the children and preparing them for future life outside of the nest. The solidarity of the family is not based on the mutual advantage of trade, but on empathy and love and shared interests--it is relatively "organic." It is a gemeinschaft. It is necessarily small-scale and cannot be used as a model for the society as a whole.
From a bourgeois perspective, the central concept of a classless society is the rule of law. A society where there are pseudolaws is not classless, since pseudolaws divide the population between those subject to sanctions if they act a certain way and those who are free to act that same way with impunity. These groups are classes in the fullest sense of the term.
To achieve a classless society we need "merely" eliminate pseudolaws. Unlike Marx, who was not very precise in his thinking and writing, we can thus be extremely specific in our description of the classless society. Marx spoke vaguely of a "withering away of the state." Just what kind of government he thought would exist after this withering is not clear. We know only that Marx defined the state as nothing more than a mechanism by which a ruling class exploits other classes. It makes sense, therefore, to deduce that a "state" so defined cannot exist if there are no classes.
In the Metaconstitutional classless society, we can be very precise about what will and what will not have withered. Government will remain, the state in its normal sense as ongoing government will remain. All that will wither is government-as- bandit, the aspect of government which declares and enforces pseudolaws. It is not the state in general which disappears, but only the bad aspect of the state.
As we have seen in preceding chapters, eliminating pseudolaws will require extensive changes in today's world. Many parts of the world today are not governed democratically, yet the rule of law requires democracy. Governmental efforts to control prices are not found only in crumbling Communist countries, but regulation of prices is totally incompatible with the rule of law. The rule of law is incompatible with private ownership of land and other natural resources, and is also incompatible with governmental ownership of such resources, yet one pattern or the other is now the case virtually everywhere.
"Minimum wage laws" are also incompatible with the rule of law and will have to go. The rule of law implies a general freedom of voluntary association which certainly extends to the employment relationship. Laws can only outlaw actions, not the exchange of otherwise legal actions by mutual consent of the parties. If extramarital fornication, thus, is not illegal, then prostitution (extramarital fornication induced by the payment of money) cannot be made illegal. (However there is no reason why extramarital fornication cannot be made illegal.)
Finally, the elimination of pseudolaws will require establishment of a universal government. Treating people on the basis of citizenship or alien status is just another example of arbitrary government. Until we establish a world government with universal citizenship there is no way to put and end to this.
The society envisioned by the Metaconstitution is classless in the sense that government is prevented from pre-classifying people on any basis in determining when sanctions can be imposed on them. Sanctions can be imposed only for violating laws, and laws must be general rules of action. Generality means that laws must apply to all people who act in a certain way, not just to some kinds of people who act that way. Rules which only apply to people of a given age, sex, race, nationality, wealth, etc., can be said to pre-classify people on these bases. On the other hand, the two categories of people resulting from genuine laws--law- abiding and law-breakers--are created by the action of the people concerned. The law-breaker places himself in that category or class by acting in violation of a law. His placement in that class is not determined by any government official or organization, but by his own action. Government officials determine which class a person is in only in the procedural sense, only in finding that the necessary evidence of guilt exists. .
Our vision of the classless society suggests a society of highly variegated individuals living together in a wide variety of families and similar-to-families organic, small, gemeinschaft associations. The society is characterized by political democracy, maximized individual liberty, economic markets, voluntary associations of every conceivable type, and universality. All individuals receive an equal and substantial income in the form of a social dividend, their share of the total value of natural resource rents. The social dividend promotes greater economic equality and prevents concentrations of economic power that might otherwise result if the resources were privately or governmentally owned. Since all individuals are included in the public, which collectively owns all natural resources, the proletariat as defined by Marx--people who own no productive property and whose sole source of income is their labor--no longer exists.
The classless society will not be a utopia. People will not live happily forever after. Redeploying most of the money now devoted to military forces may help to reduce the threat of illnesses and other human misfortunes. A universal government will provide mechanisms for litigating conflicts rather than going to war. But there will still be plenty of illness, loneliness, fear, unhappiness, frustration, and death. Eliminating war as a frequent and massive phenomenon may even have its down side. In the past war has provided entertainment, diversion, and relief from boredom from many of the individuals caught up in them. More than ever, mankind may need a "moral equivalent of war" to fill the vacuum.
Perhaps professional team sports, especially the more violent ones like football, will be part of the "moral equivalent." But there is a limit to how many people can sit for how long in stadiums or before television sets. One might hope that peace will bring universal prosperity and that prosperity will bring a proliferation of culture. In the healthy society people will be more concerned with music--and with things like music--than with politics. Children--the focal point of the family, which is the basic unit of bourgeois society--may lead the way here. Children take a natural and passionate interest in music if given half a chance, whereas an interest in politics is rare, seldom passionate, and emerges only in adolescence or adulthood, if ever.
How should we live? Once the basic issues of the political and economic environment within which we live have been worked out, once we have social conditions within which a decent life is generally available, this question arises with an awful clarity. How, indeed, shall we live?
It is difficult to address this issue without descending to cliches. But this fact only suggests that there is no big secret or deep mystery about how we ought to live. The answers sound like cliches because we have known what they are for a very long time. Many people have tried to live on the basis of these answers to the extent external conditions allowed, and they have often done pretty well at it. If conditions are better, success should be more likely. But no matter how good our institutional circumstances, unwise living will continue to produce miserable lives for the unwise and for their close associates.
People are born into a family, live in families, die out of families. Clearly, adults should conduct themselves so that their children can develop into the best possible people that their particular abilities and personalities allow. As a well-known hymn puts it:
Grant us then pure hearts and patient
that in all we do or say
little ones our deeds may copy
and be never led astray;
little feet our steps may follow
in a safe and narrow way.Foonote 3.
The force of example is the greatest of all forces. Thinking about the example they should set their children is an important method by which adults can clarify their own values and put their own lives in order. And even people who have no children of their own will be dealing with other people's children. If they are going to behave responsibly, they too will need to consider the example they are setting.
If the family "inputs" consist of the birth of children, then its "outputs" consist of the deaths of its members. (Another possible output, the maturation of children and their moving out to independent lives and formation of their "own" families is properly regarded not so much as an output as in a changing role in their original family household.) While people do not always have control over when and how they are going to die, technological development offers some promise (or threat!) that choices about these questions will increasingly have to be made. More and more often, for example, decisions must be made for or against heroic artificial measures to prevent the death of mortally ill or injured individuals. But who should make the decision about "plug-pulling," as it is commonly called? The legal system? The medical system? The individual in question? The family of the individual in question?
The issue is complicated by the fact that the dying person may not be able to communicate a decision, and by the fact that incredible amounts of money may be involved one way or the other. It has been estimated that half of a person's lifetime medical expenditures are incurred during the last six months of life. With medical costs becoming a very substantial part of the gross national product in the developed countries, sooner or later we will have to face the question of the tradeoffs between substantially lower standards of living and an additional six months of existence--often in misery and pain--for the average individual. It is by no means obvious that it would be unthinkable to prefer slightly shorter lifespans.
What is clear is that to the extent the dying person can control the situation, he should not allow it to make an adverse impact on the future lives of members of his family. Decisions which in effect prolong one life slightly but impoverish the family should be avoided, and not only because they are financially irresponsible and self-centered. Such decisions convey the attitude that death is the ultimate evil to be feared and resisted at all costs, and may help make surviving members of the family emotionally incapable of enjoying their remaining lifespans. On the other hand, care should be taken not to suggest that life is not precious and of great value. Suicide or euthanasia may suggest and propagate such an attitude as well as inflicting other emotional injuries on surviving family members. This is not to say that suicide or euthanasia ought to be illegal, or never make any sense under any circumstances, but only that this escape route should be taken only with due regard for the welfare of the family.
Divorce of spouses and total severing of relationships between children and parents initiated by either party are also possible "outputs" from families. Clearly, they will sometimes happen, and equally clearly they are great tragedies with serious consequences for every member of the family. Great efforts should be made to avoid such developments, perhaps more heroic efforts than are justified to prolong a life. But they will not always be successful. A Metaconstitutional society is not a utopia, it must be repeated, and many bad things will happen in it.
In the Metaconstitutional society the virtues outside the family, like those inside, will be pretty much as they are already understood at the personal level today. It will be good to help other people. Love will be loved and reverence will be revered. Good people will seek truth and virtue and beauty. Development and refinement of personality will be an important life goal for people.
People in the Metaconstitutional society will respect the limits of nature and be concerned about future generations. They will not want to burn the bridges of their children and their children's children. While concerned with the future, though, they will not hold condescending attitudes towards the past. Rather than sneering at their ancestors, they will remember that these were people, too, and they will try to learn about them and to learn from them. People will be interested in their family roots, without which they will realize that they would not even exist. They will not see the past as a mere means to the glorious present, but as an end in itself for those who happened to live in it. People will say to themselves, "We are the past of tomorrow; we are the future of yesterday."
People will understand that ultimately everybody is a unique individual. They will understand that the classes or categories of people that we may see are classes or categories of individuals, and that no such classifications can tell us everything about any individual. Neither age nor sex nor race nor nationality nor you-name-it can be an adequate basis for judging another individual or deciding how to act towards that person. They will understand that a fully human civilization, a fully human life, requires us to rise above our differences and put them in perspective.
******************************************
1. Ann Fremantle (Ed), Mao Tse-tung: An Anthology of His Writings (N.Y: Mentor, 1962), p. 281.
2. Robert P. Wolff, Barrington Moore, Jr., and Herbert Marcuse, A Critique of Pure Tolerance (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969), pp. 114-115.
3. Christian Burke, "Lord of Life and King of Glory", The Methodist Hymnal (Nashville: Whitman and Smith, 1939), p. 426.