Copyright © 1998 by Paul F. deLespinasse, Adrian College
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Footnotes are at the end of the chapter.
"Without any censorship in the West fashionable trends of thought and ideas are carefully separated from those which are not fashionable; nothing is forbidden, but what is not fashionable will hardly ever find its way into periodicals or books or be heard in colleges."Legally, our researchers are free, but they are conditioned by the fashion of the day....
"I have received letters in America from highly intelligent persons, maybe a teacher in a far away small college who could do much for the renewal and salvation of his country, but his country cannot hear him because the media are not interested in him."
Alexander Solzhenitsyn (1978)
We have been examining the general profile of an ideal government. Experience and widely-shared "bourgeois" values have lead us to several specific conclusions about a Metaconstitutional government. The most fundamental conclusion is that such a government must respect the rule of law and refrain from pseudolaws. The rule of law in turn implies that government must be democratic, that economic markets must be free, that all natural resources must be publicly-owned, and that the government must be a universal one.
The careful reader may have noticed, however, that there are certain issues that we have totally ignored. One of these is the form which an ideal government would take. Should it be a constitutional monarchy or a republic? Should the legislature be unicameral or bicameral? Should there be a separation of powers between executive, legislative, and judicial branches? Should judges be appointed or elected, and should they have unlimited tenure? Should elected officials have a limited number of terms?
Questions of form are very interesting. Alexander Pope's famous witticism ("For forms of government, let fools contest; whate'er is best administered is best" Footnote 1. ) contains at best a half-truth. The likelihood of "good administration" may depend in large part on governmental form. But a general discussion of form would be inappropriate here.
For one thing, form has been discussed so extensively elsewhere that there is little new to say about it. For another thing, experience has not been conclusive as to the relative merits of this form and that form. Answers may be better determined by experiment than by theoretical argument. Finally, proponents of political change never have the luxury of writing upon a clean slate. Efforts to implement an ideal government along the lines discussed here must therefore take existing institutions into account. It may not always be expedient to pursue preconceived notions of an ideal form. Instead, we must concentrate on getting a government that complies with the basic Metaconstitutional requirements set forth in the previous chapters.
Instead of turning our attention to questions of form, we will therefore now turn to an entirely different dimension of the problem of ideal government: how can we get there from here? What ought to be done?
What ought to be done? is a very different question from what ought to be?, which was addressed in Part I of this book. Let us recall briefly the hypothetical example with which I introduced this distinction in chapter 1. You have been shipwrecked on a small island. The island permits survival, but not far away is another island which would allow a much better life. Therefore, you conclude,"I ought to be on the other island." This is what ought to be. But what ought to be done? Perhaps you cannot swim. Perhaps there is nothing on your present island with which to construct a boat. Perhaps the waters between the islands are filled with sharks. It is therefore reasonable to say both:
Clearly, our decisions about what to do depend in part on our conclusions about ought to what be. But our decisions do not depend only on such conclusions.
How should reasonable people decide how to act in pursuing their goals, including perhaps the goal of an ideal, Metaconstitutional government? The first thing we must ask about any proposed action is: will it deliver the goods? As Bertrand Russell put it:
"If I want to travel to New York, reason tells me that it is better to take a plane which is going to New York than one which is going to Constantinople. I suppose that those who think me unduly rational consider that I ought to become so agitated at the airport as to jump into the first plane that I see, and when it lands in Constantinople I ought to curse the people among whom I find myself for being Turks and not Americans." Footnote 2.
Russell continues:
"I suppose the essence of the matter is this: that I do not think it a good thing to be in that state of insane excitement in which people do things that have consequences directly opposite to what they intend...."
If an action does not achieve the desired goal or at least move us closer to achieving that desired goal, it has no value relative to achievement of that goal. It has not delivered the goods.
But not all actions which do achieve our goal are a good idea. One stone may kill two birds, and one action can cause more than one thing to happen. It is good if one result of an action is achievement of our goal. But what if the other result of the action is a disaster? We do not normally prescribe arsenic to cure a headache, even though it will cure the headache. Not do we want to burn the barn down in order to roast the pig, even though it will roast the pig. Before we can express an intelligent opinion about a proposed action, we must not only find out whether it will further our goal, but we must also consider the side effects that it will produce.
Most actions produce side effects, so we need not find actions which produce no side effects. But we do need to consider whether the expected side effects of an action are acceptable in relation to our goal. Since the goal can be considered a benefit and the side effects a cost of achieving that goal, we must engage in cost-benefit analysis. And a very important question which arises in the context of cost- benefit analysis is: could we find some other action which would achieve the same goal, but at lower cost? Is there some alternative action which produces the same benefits but with different, less objectionable, side effects? Perhaps an aspirin could cure the headache. Clearly, it is not rational to "pay" more for something if we can get it for less.
The availability of alternative actions which will achieve a goal, however, depends upon our circumstances. If Lord Russell had lived a century earlier, he would not have had the option of flying to New York (or to Constantinople) in a few hours from London. We can choose only from among those actions which current circumstances make possible. There may therefore be goals which cannot be effectively pursued at a given time because no conceivable action available under the circumstances can deliver the goal, or because all of the available actions which could deliver the goal would also produce unacceptable side effects. Accordingly, it may be necessary to modify or compromise our goal to one which can be achieved at acceptable cost. We may sometimes even need to abandon a goal completely. Sometimes we have to stay on our present island, inadequate though it may be. Sometimes we simply cannot get there from here, even if we have good reason to think that things would be a lot better "over there."
Even if we cannot get there from here, it may be possible to get there from someplace else to which we can get from here. If today's circumstances do not allow any actions which could achieve our goal at an acceptable price, perhaps at least they allow us to act to bring about less unfortunate circumstances in the future. Better future circumstances, indeed, are one type of goal which we can pursue by today's actions. We can invest in the future by working for future circumstances which will allow us to act in the future to achieve a goal whose realization is impossible or too costly under present circumstances. Aeronautical engineers, in effect, changed the previous circumstances so that by mid- twentieth century people like Lord Russell could have the option of flying across the Atlantic Ocean in a few hours.
These are all factors that must be considered if we wish to act rationally in pursuit of the Metaconstitution--or of any other goal.
It is easy to formulate political, economic, and social standards, hold the actual world up against them, and conclude that today's world is a mess. In many respects, by almost anybody's standards, the world is a mess. Radicals and reactionaries, liberals and conservatives, differ only in the things they would like to change, not in their desire to change things. A far more difficult problem is to figure out what to do. History is full of horrible things done by people who had noble aspirations to improve or perfect the world, but who were frustrated because others got in the way and slowed things down. As we have just demonstrated, even if we have correctly identified what ought to be (and we can never be absolutely certain about this, as a practical matter) we do not automatically know from that what ought to be done. What ought to be done depends not only on our values, or sense of what ought to be, but also on our circumstances, our alternatives and the probable consequences of our possible actions. For example, we have argued that government has no business regulating the prices at which exchanges between private parties take place. However this does not mean that if price controls already exist we should abandon them abruptly. To do so might be like blowing up a dam that we have decided ought not to have been built. The damage downstream would be colossal unless the resulting lake were first gradually drained. Similarly, economic damage may be minimized by relaxing price controls gradually, even though that requires us to tolerate an imperfect situation for some time in the future.
Political dynamics, the politics of change, is a very complicated matter. Idealists become frustrated because improvements come slowly even when they exert themselves to the utmost. Political change is like the behavior of light: its direction is more easily modified than its speed. The direction of light can be changed easily enough with the aid of a mirror or prism, whereas its speed in a vacuum is a constant (represented by physicists as c, as in the famous equation E = mc squared) and its apparent speed can be changed only by directing it though matter such as water or glass. Likewise, "politics is a slow boring of hard boards." Footnote 3. Of course, not all political observers see it this way. Marxists tended to see political change as the opposite of light: the direction of history was inevitably towards communism and, thus, a constant which human effort could not modify. The speed of change, however, could be modified by deliberate human efforts. Thus Marxists reconciled their assertion that communism was historically inevitable with their rabid activism: They were merely helping to hasten the revolution and ease the birth pangs of the new order which was going to arrive anyhow.
Since the Marxists appear to have reversed the actual relationship between the speed of political change and its direction, it is no wonder that they tended to be horribly frustrated people. It is also no wonder that some of the worst atrocities on record have been committed by Marxists.
A fact that extreme idealists often refuse to face is that all of our actions must be taken within the limits of current circumstances, whether we like them or not. The more unequivocally one rejects the current situation as a value, perhaps the harder it is to accept it as a fact that must be worked with. Ignorance is not bliss. What we do not know or refuse to think about can hurt us. The actual consequences of an action depend on the way the world in which we acted is and not on how we think it is or wish it were. If we wish to bring about changes that constitute improvements, therefore, we must strive to see and accept the present state of affairs as a fact even as we are rejecting portions of it as a value.
The circumstances that we will be acting within tomorrow, however, need not be taken as a given. In part, they may be changed by the actions that we take today. Thus, there may be some place we would like to get to, but which we cannot get to from "here." But maybe we could get there from someplace else to which we can get from here. In the case of the shipwreck discussed earlier, for example, if an inability to swim is the only reason it is imprudent for us to try to go to the other island, with its superior conditions, then perhaps we can teach ourself to swim and then make the crossing.
Impossibility is important, but it is also important to recognize that impossibility exists in two different senses. The term can refer to actions that will never be possible, or to those which are not presently possible. It is important to try to be clear about which form of impossibility we are talking about. There is no use in tilting at windmills or breaking our heads against a brick wall. On the other hand:
"much historical experience ... tells us that goals unattainable now will never be reached unless they are articulated while they are still unattainable."Footnote 4.
Going to the moon was only presently impossible when the Kennedy administration decided to do this in the early 1960's. By 1969. the impossibility had been turned into a realized possibility. A world government is impossible today in the same sense of the term. Whether this desirable part of the Metaconstitution will be achieved depends on how we all act in years to come. Having one's cake and eating it too is impossible in the other sense. When political leaders promise us the impossible, we need to ask ourselves which kind of impossibility they are promising before we decide how to respond. The person wishing to convert present impossibilities into tomorrow's actualities may be a statesman who deserves our support. The person who promises to deliver the intrinsically impossible is a demagogue who should be hounded unceremoniously from public life.
Politics has been called the art of the possible. This, we now see, includes making things possible that were not previously so. As Milton Eisenhower has put it, "(W)e can only pay for the past, but we can invest in the future."Footnote 5.
Metaphorically, of course we can and do pay for the past. We must live with the consequences of yesterday's actions, even when these are most unpleasant. Bridges burned cannot be crossed again until they have been laboriously rebuilt. Constructive creativity is much harder to come by than is the destructive variety. Any idiot with a box of dynamite or a rifle can blow up a bridge or assassinate a top political leader; repairing the damage may take years or even be impossible.
We pay for past actions by living with their results. But should we pay for the past in any fuller sense of the term? Is atonement a possible concept in politics, and if so is it desirable? In America, this issue has come up in connection with treatment of Indians and black people. There can be no doubt that past treatment of these minorities was a national scandal of the first magnitude, particularly in a nation claiming divine inspiration and declaring its independence with the phrase "All men are created equal." The question is not whether grave injustices were done in the past, but rather what ought to be done about it today.
Regarding some issues, at least, our present analysis provides a definite answer to the question. For example, the land "stolen from the Indians" need not be "given back" because any title to the land which might have been claimed by Indians is just as illegitimate as the European claims. If, as Henry George maintained, no one has any right to give out permanent property rights in land, this is just as much an obstacle to Indian claims as it is to those of Europeans.
Furthermore, even if restitution were indicated, it is impossible to give it to the past victims of bad behavior. The Indians who were robbed are now all dead. Any compensation would have to be to descendants of the actual victims. However it is hard to be sure which, if any, of these descendants were actually harmed by the past injustices. In fact, it is perverse for anyone to argue that he was harmed by injustices occurring before his very conception and birth. Each of us is here today only because of long and improbable chains of past events, and a change in any one of these, including injustices, would mean that we would never have been born.
Natural law, thus, must include a "statute of historical limitations," analogous to the statute of limitations preventing prosecution of crimes after a certain number of years has passed. It is both right and prudent to let bygones be bygones.
Another sense in which we may be said to pay for the past is when compensation is paid to people who have profited from bad institutions which are being eliminated. Henry George bristled at this suggestion, and especially at the idea that it was mandatary to compensate, in connection with the land issue:
"The consideration that seems to cause hesitation, even on the part of those who see clearly that land by right is common property, is the idea that having permitted land to be treated as private property for so long, we should in abolishing it be doing a wrong to those who have been suffered to base their calculations upon its permanence; that having permitted land to be held as rightful property, we should by the resumption of common rights be doing injustice to those who have purchased it with what was unquestionably their rightful property. Thus, it is held that if we abolish private property in land, justice requires that we should fully compensate those who now possess it, as the British Government, in abolishing the purchase and sale of military commissions, felt itself bound to compensate those who held commissions which they had purchased in the belief that they could sell them again, or as in abolishing slavery in the British West Indies, $100,000,000 was paid to the slaveholders."Footnote 6.
These cases, however, do not involve paying for the past, but trying to minimize the present costs of attaining a better future. It is, of course, very offensive to argue that slaveholders deserve to be paid for having done something that is immoral. But what they were doing was legal, and it might be possible to make a strong argument that they have a legal (as distinguished from moral) right to be compensated when they are deprived of their property. In the case of slavery, however, questions of a right to compensation are largely beside the point, for the real issue was its expediency. No doubt if the U.S. government had sought to eliminate slavery by seizing all slaves under the eminent domain power, it would have been very costly to provide "just compensation" as required by the Fifth AMendment. But the Civil War by means of which slavery was actually eliminated did not exactly come cheap. Its estimated cost in dollars alone,and to the North alone, was $6.5 billion. Three hundred sixty four thousand people were killed, many more wounded,and millions of lives were disrupted. By the process of war, the four million slaves were liberated at an average cost of $1625. At the beginning of the Civil War, the average fair market value (or basis for "just compensation") of slaves was about $1600. Even forgetting about the 364,000 fatalities, the war was no bargain!
The possibility of emancipating the slaves via the eminent domain power is an excellent example of the sequencing problem which faces reformers. The eminent domain power has no place in an ideal government, for it imposes sanctions on people who have violated no general rule of action. Yet it might have offered the best escape from the dilemma posed by slavery. A country with slavery is not ideal, and when the society is not ideal it may be a step backwards to introduce particular elements of the ideal. The non-ideal institution of eminent domain may offer the ideal way to get rid of the non-ideal institution of slavery.
The advantages of a peaceful end to slavery are more apparent now that they might have been at the time. Nobody expected the Civil War, and nobody expected it would be so long, so bloody, and so expensive. At the time, most people would have compared the costs of emancipation via eminent domain, not with the costs of the upcoming Civil War, but with the costs of doing nothing. Eminent domain would therefore have seemed intolerably expensive. Even an inspired national leader would have found it impossible to "sell" it to the people.
Substantive radicalism, we have suggested, is all very well. The world is not as it should be. We can and perhaps must, therefore, be very critical of existing societies and governments. Procedurally, however, the whole thrust of our analysis indicates that we need to be extremely cautious, even conservative, in our actions. What ought to be done is a separate question from what ought to be, and the logic of action dictates that we think about alternatives and probable consequences before we rush out to put the world right. Putting things right is obviously desirable. It is also very difficult and dangerous. No matter how bad things are, we can always make them worse by un-thoughtful efforts to improve them.
Perhaps most people today tend to exaggerate the tightness of limits to political creativity. They thus do nothing to improve the world, and do it with a clear conscience. But some people on the other extreme exaggerate the looseness of constraints on political creativity. These people are often troublesome because their admirable enthusiasm and degree of organization are sometimes coupled with a revolutionary disdain for prudence and for factors that make it impossible to make a large constructive impact on the world overnight.
Revolutions are abrupt and sweeping changes carried out in ways not authorized by the existing system of institutions. But unanticipated consequences, including highy unpleasant ones, are more likely the more sweeping and abrupt a change is. In revolutions, one must stake much on the untested validity of a social theory about relations between actions and consequences.
Reformers present an interesting contrast to revolutionaries. Rather than the wholesale alienation of the revolutionary, the reformer is characterized by retail alienation from the existing order. He is willing to work within the confines of existing institutions to change them for the better. He does not agree with Voltaire's revolutionary advice: "If you want good laws, burn those you have and make new ones." The reformer does not approve of certain aspects of his country's government, but he works for improvements by peaceful and lawful means. For example, in the United States he works by legislation passed by existing legislatures, by amendments to the Constitution through processes laid down by that same Constitution.
In reforms, one can take one step at a time, "test the ice," back up when necessary. Implementing the reforms constitutes a gradual test of the ideas involved. Modifications can be made in the theory, or in the approach to putting it into practice. Reforms, furthermore, are implemented by people and processes already firmly established in a country. These leaders are unlikely to feel the insecurity which afflicts successful revolutionaries, who are morbidly aware that rulers may be here today and gone tomorrow. The reformer need not feel that having to admit a mistake once in a while will endanger his stature or existence. Since the technique of the reformer requires him to work within institutions that he does not at all regard as perfect, it is more difficult for him than it is for the revolutionary to convince himself that all opponents are evil. To oppose absolute virtue (the role in which the revolutionary likes to cast himself) is obviously absolute iniquity. There is always more bloodshed in revolutions than in reforms.
Political philosophers have appreciated this fact for a long time. St. Thomas Aquinas, in his Summa Theologica, set down the basic rule for deciding when a revolution is justifiable: It is proper to overthrow a tyrant unless the state will be so disturbed in the process that the subjects would suffer more from the consequent uproar than they would from continuation of the tyrant's rule. Later writers suggest that if this rule were followed there would be very few revolutions:
"He who desires to attempts to reform the government of a state, and wishes to have it accepted and capable of maintaining itself to the satisfaction of everybody, must at least retain the semblance of the old forms; so that it may seem to the people that there has been no change in the institutions, even though in fact they are entirely different from the old ones. For the great majority of mankind are satisfied with appearances." Footnote 7. (Machiavelli)"(I)t is ... dangerous to remove a king, even though it is perfectly clear that he is a tyrant. For a people accustomed to royal rule, and kept in check by that alone, will despise and make a mockery of any lessor authority; and so, if it removes one king, it will find it necessary to replace him by another, and he will be a tyrant not by choice but by necessity. (Spinoza) Footnote 8.
"(A) revolution will be the very last resource of the thinking and the good." Footnote 9. (Burke)
"... I propose to accomplish the same thing in a simpler, easier, and quieter way, than that of formally confiscating all the land and formally letting it all out to the highest bidders. To do that would involve a needless shock to present customs and habits of thought--which is to be avoided. To do that would involve a needless extension of government machinery--which is to be avoided. It is an axiom of statesmanship...that great changes can best be brought about under old forms.... I do not propose either to purchase or to confiscated private property in land....It is not necessary to confiscate land; it is only necessary to confiscate rent. (George) Footnote 10.
The contrast between the reformist and revolutionary mentalities is instructive. Marx and Engels concluded their 1848 Communist Manifesto in the following terms:
"The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only for the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions. Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communist revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Workingmen of all countries, unite!" Footnote 11.
But in the very same Manifesto, Marx and Engels implicitly admitted that history did not support their assertion that workers had nothing lose but their chains. Historically, the class struggle was:
"an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the struggling classes." (Emphasis added.) Footnote 12.
At the very least, there is an apparent paradox in pursuing an ideal society by actions which have no place in that ideal. In the case of the Metaconstitution the paradox is not just apparent. A basic premise of the Metaconstitution is that sanctions are legitimate only when imposed on people who have violated general rules of action laid down in advance. Only governments can plausibly proclaim general rules of action, for no one else is in a position to enforce rules at all generally, and a rule which is not generally enforced is not general no matter how it is phrased. For private persons to try to achieve the Metaconstitution by revolutionary force and violence would therefore contradict a principle that is more fundamental than the Metaconstitution itself.
There is one additional reason why revolution is not a suitable method for bringing about a Metaconstitutional government. An important element of the Metaconstitution is a universal government, and when no such government exists the necessary seizure of power simultaneously in many different countries would be totally impossible. Seizure of power in one country and using that country as a "base" for worldwide revolution would encounter all the problems the Communists did in Russia and then some. "Socialism in one country," which was controversial enough in intra-Party politics, at least sounds like it could be conceivable. "Universal government in one country" would be hard for anybody to say with a straight face.
Actually, revolution is an unsuitable method for bringing about any improvement in the human condition, not just for bringing in the Metaconstitution. By destroying an existing government, revolution temporarily creates a situation that is similar to the "state of nature" that existed before any governments existed. As we have seen, the state of nature invites creation of a protection racket which is bound to be even worse than the presumably bad government that was destroyed by the revolution. It may take generations to reform the government which emerges from this protection racket so that it is no worse than the government destroyed by the revolution.
Aside from reform and revolution, there is only one other method by which enthusiasts for a Metaconstitutional government might go about trying to establish it. This remaining possible method is war. However the logic of warfare, with its collective imposition of sanctions on whole groups of people without any regard to their personal desserts or behavior, is fundamentally at odds with the basic Metaconstitutional proposition, namely, that sanctions can legitimately be imposed only on individuals who have violated a general rule of action laid down in advance. It is true that even a fully Metaconstitutional government must be prepared to use military force if it is faced with insurrection on a scale which makes it impossible to protect itself merely via laws applied against individuals. But the basic responsibility for the failure to govern by law in such a situation would rest, not on the government but on those whose concerted actions made the rule of law impossible.
While the defensive use of military force is compatible with Metaconstitutional values, employment of military force for offensive purposes, to help bring the Metaconstitution into existence, would be an entirely different question. Although the use of military force cannot entirely be ruled out on principle, the most likely situation where it would be reasonable would be if nearly all of the world had unified itself peacefully into a virtually universal government but there were a few holdouts. The advantage of the nearly universal government in such a situation would be so overwhelming that there could be no doubt of the outcome if it came to an actual battle. It would therefore be very likely that if the willingness and intention of the central authorities to fight if necessary were firm, and the holdouts understood this, no fight would be necessary. The holdouts would bow to the inevitable. And if it came to a fight, losses would be incurred mainly by the outclassed holdouts. However if the situation was this one-sided, it would seem that less extreme methods such as economic blockade would have equally good prospects for bringing the holdout countries into the universal government, though the process might take longer..
War obviously cannot be the main method by which we seek to establish a Metaconstitutional government, since a government which is incompatible with widely shared attitudes cannot be created and if created cannot be maintained. And war is a very inefficient methods of changing attitudes, except in the sense that by killing enough individuals who have one attitude, it may make some other attitude numerically more predominant. It is certainly not true that wars never settle anything, but it is also true that they have little appeal to the thoughtful reformer who is seeking to improve the world as much, as rapidly, and as inexpensively as possible.
If the Metaconstitution is to be brought into existence, the major tool for doing so must be reform. Revolution and war can play, at most, very limited parts. They may occasionally serve as allies of reform in specific situations, but can never be the senior partner in the endeavor without ruining the whole tone and thrust of the Metaconstitutional vision itself.
Reform must address itself to the shaping of attitudes. A Metaconstitution imposed by force on people whose attitudes are incompatible with the norms by which it must operate could not continue to exist for long without violating its own fundamental values. There is no use in establishing such a government before public opinion is ready for it and prepared to live with it. A principle task of the reformer is therefore to bring about changes in public attitudes. If this can be done on a large enough scale, indeed, the actual job of instituting the new government will be almost trivial.
Take, for example, the dimension of the Metaconstitution that we have called its universality. There are many people who do not believe that a world government is possible. They point, among other things, to the large number of people who do not think that such a regime would be desirable. Imagine, however, that a vast majority of the people in the world were to become persuaded that a world government would be a very fine idea. If this were the case, it is self-evident that such a government would be not only possible, but also very probable.
The ability to persuade large numbers of people that a world government will be desirable in turn will hinge on whether in fact such a regime would be a good idea. If indeed it is a good idea, as I have argued in earlier chapters, then it should be possible to convince people of this fact if we approach the task thoughtfully and systematically.
Securing attitude changes will be both easier and harder than it might seem at first glance. On the one hand, it will not be necessary to convince even a majority of the total population that a Metaconstitutional regime is desirable. Most people are not very active politically. It will therefore suffice to convince the relatively small number of people who are opinion leaders and political activists. If 80% of the newspaper and TV reporters and editors, 80% of the ministers of religion, 80% of the "captains of industry," can be brought around, the job will be virtually completed. This is the good news.
The bad news is that the kinds of people we especially need to convince may be the hardest to reach. Most of these people have done better than average in their lives and professions. They will therefore be reluctant to consider the possibility that they need to make major changes in their outlooks and feelings about political and social issues. People whose lives have not gone very well are much more likely to be receptive to radical ideas, and there can be no avoiding the fact that the Metaconstitution incorporates ideas that are radical by today's standards. The successful people whose support will provide the greatest leverage to the movement are precisely the people who may be most afraid of basic reforms, because they cannot be sure that they would be as well off as they are now under the conditions of the new society.
Until there have been major attitude changes at least among key opinion leaders, there is little hope that prominent elected officials will support the campaign for a Metaconstitutional order. Successful politicians have thrived in the old order and cannot be sure that they could do as well in a new order. They may prefer to be big frogs in little national puddles than to be little frogs in a large universal puddle. And even leaders convinced of the desirability of a Metaconstitutional government could not afford to speak out if public opinion is still opposed to the needed reforms.
People who lightly accuse today's elected leaders of stupidity or lack of vision are looking at things very superficially. The whole purpose of democracy is to make government leaders sensitive to the values and desires of the general public, and a functioning democracy does just that by means of periodic elections. Every time an elected official says or does anything, he or she must keep in mind the possible side effects this will have on chances for reelection. An official who wants to be reelected, and this is normally the case, must be careful not to say things that will upset too many voters, even if he or she devoutly believes they are true. And officials must avoid doing things that voters will not support, no matter how convinced they are that such actions would be the right way to go.
To a great extent, today's elected leaders are intelligent, well-meaning people. The extent to which they say and do stupid, ultimately counterproductive things probably depends much more on what the "market" for votes will bear than on their personal intelligence. When they do stupid things, it often may be because if they did the intelligent thing they would lose the next election and they are not that stupid! We can take it as axiomatic that our leaders are smarter than they act.
If it were not for the pressure placed on leaders by democracy, elected officials might be the ideal target for a campaign to change attitudes on behalf of the Metaconstitution. Officials have the power to act in the name of their government, and it is easy for them to get public attention. As allies in the campaign to implement the Metaconstitution they would therefore be formidable. . . were it not for this one little problem. In countries which are not democracies, therefore, top officials of the government will actually be a more important campaign target than they are in the democracies. In the democracies, elected officials should not be ignored by the campaign. But no particular priority need be given to bringing these officials around.
Techniques for getting people to change their attitudes are a vast subject in their own right. Professions which are interested in these techniques include teachers, preachers, clinical psychologists and psychiatrists, sales and marketing researchers, and campaign managers. Clearly, we cannot get deeply into this complicated subject here, but individuals who are working to implement the Metaconstitution would do well to draw on the accumulated insight from all of these bodies of experience. They would also do well to study techniques employed by reformers in the past and their various successes and failures. As Bismark supposedly observed once, "Fools learn from experience; wise men learn from other people's experience."
A basic problem facing reformers is that many people have trouble imagining that the world could be any different from the one they are presently experiencing. Although the young are supposed to be more flexible in their thinking than older people, they will not have witnessed as many changes as older people have and may therefore find it hard to visualize future changes taking place.
As a substitute for personal experience of major changes in the world, reformers may wish to subject the young, and not only the young, to large doses of history. The history should not just be a recitation of political developments, although these are important and revealing, but also of scientific, technological, and cultural developments, and of developments and changes in ideas about major aspects of life. The better grasp people in general have of the dramatic changes which took place regularly in the past, the easier it will be for them to imagine similar changes occurring in the future. And if they can imagine big changes happening in the future, people may become willing to discuss seriously the question: what kinds of changes would we like to see, and is there any way of acting in the present so as to ensure that the coming changes are in the right direction?
Certain kinds of literature likewise, even if only "meant to amuse and written to buy groceries," Foonote 13. can also help people to imagine the possibility of major changes in the world. Science fiction, especially, has considerable power to educate readers to see the possibility of change, and reformers should encourage people to read such literature both as an academic subject in the universities and as a form of recreation. The reformers might also consider deliberately writing works of science fiction to draw people's attention to the implications of the social arrangements and institutions proposed by the Metaconstitution. Science fiction helped create the climate of opinion (among the opinion leaders) in which the U.S. government could get public support for the project to send people to the moon. It might also help to soften people up and make them receptive, in due course, to a serious campaign to establish a Metaconstitutional overnment.
Space travel itself, oddly enough, may provide powerful images which support creating a universal, Metaconstitutional government. The famous color photograph of "spaceship earth," a blue sphere hanging against the backdrop of black space, is already beginning to drive home to people the idea that we live on a single planet, are of one race (the human race), share a common fate, and are literally in the same boat. This is exactly the kind of attitude which must be widely shared before it will be possible to get and to keep a Metaconstitutional government. If this picture could be hung in every classroom on the planet, without any words at all, or perhaps with the simple words (in the local language) "This is our home," it would be a major step forward.
Since reformers must work with the available materials, poor though they may be, they must be prepared to work with people whose attitudes are not yet conducive to the goals they (the reformers) are pursuing. Fortunately for reformers, a person's attitudes frequently coexist with each other in very uneasy ways. That is, the person typically has some attitudes whose implications and requirements are quite incompatible with the implications and requirements of some of their other attitudes. This provides an opportunity for the reformer who is seeking to get people to change some of their attitudes.
Attitude change cannot be brought about by means of sheer political or economic power, by the threat of sanctions or by the offer of inducements. The power of the sword, it is true, could conceivably alter the distribution of attitudes within a given population by simply killing those who have the "wrong" attitudes. People who already have the "right" ideas will then be a numerically more dominant part of the remaining population. However to kill people because of their attitudes is so patently incompatible with the rule of law, the basic Metaconstitutional value, that it would be a totally unacceptable method of reform, even if it was a promising method of bringing about needed attitude changes.
In fact, killing people with the wrong attitudes would produce have no such results. Most people are not stupid enough to tell the truth about how they think and feel if they know they will get their heads bashed in. Instead, they will keep their ideas to themselves or even, if necessary, lie by pretending to have attitudes which are totally at odds with their actual feelings. This is not progress, since their actions will continue to reflect their actual attitudes, not the expedient ones they are articulating. Since the possibility of a Metaconstitutional government is determined by people's actual attitudes, creation of a society of hypocrites, of people who preach one thing in their words and practice the opposite in their actions, will not advance the cause.
In fact, a society in which many people have been forced to conceal their actual attitudes will compound the problems faced by reformers, not ameliorate them. As before, there will be some people whose attitudes are reasonably supportive of Metaconstitutional reforms and other whose attitudes impede such reforms. But it will now be difficult for reformers to find out which individuals are in which camp. They will therefore not know whose attitudes need to be reformed and who is already a dependable ally. And it is very difficult to enter into productive discussions--necessary to bring about attitude changes--with people whose actual thoughts and attitudes cannot be ascertained. The fact has therefore got to be faced that there is no use trying to force people to change their attitudes.
Threatened sanctions or the offer of inducements may get some people to act differently than they otherwise would have acted. And acting differently may ultimately be reflected in changed attitudes. For example racists may be induced to attend an integrated seminar by the offer of generous stipends for those who participate. The seminar may bring them into contact with people of other races, as a result of which their resort to racial stereotypes in their thinking is reduced and their racist ideas somewhat undermined by the good feelings they have developed for specific individuals of the other races. The same kind of interracial interaction may also be forced on people by the threat of sanctions for those who will not participate. But good results would be less likely in this latter case, since the whole experience would be contaminated with resentment about the compelled participation. And of course in a society where people couldn't express their actual attitudes, one wouldn't know just who should be invited or compelled to participate in such a seminar.
To the extent that threatened sanctions or the offer of inducements can be effective in getting people to act in ways which in turn help bring changed attitudes, their success is based on the fact that the sanctions or inducements appeal to the attitudes and desires that these people already have. This, then, is just a special case of the principle noted above, namely that reformers must exploit the opportunities offered by the fact that all individuals have many attitudes and that the attitudes held by any one individual very likely have many conflicting implications. The job of the reformer in persuading such a person to adopt changed attitudes is to help that person become aware that some of his ideas and values call for actions whose consequences are disturbing to other ideas and values that he has. When a person becomes aware of such a conflict in his or her own values and beliefs, some kind of change becomes almost inevitable. It is the reformer's job to try to encourage that these changes be in the desired direction.
John Rawls' concept of "reflective equilibrium"Footnote 14. is very much in point here. Everybody has certain beliefs and feelings about what is good and what is bad. Rawls notes that these beliefs and feelings are expressed at two levels. They are expressed in a general way in the form of the principles or rules of living in which we believe. And they are expressed in concrete situations by our feelings of satisfaction or unhappiness with the specific consequences of specific actions or proposed actions. And, as Rawls notes, our feelings at the level of principles do not always jibe with our feelings about the actual results of applying these principles in specific situations. That is, a principle in which we strongly believe may require us to act in a way which produces results we consider to be outrageous. In Rawls' terms, this is the absence of reflective equilibrium.
My own favorite example of reflective disequilibrium is found in a work of fiction, Victor Hugo's novel Les Miserables. Jean Valjean, the book's protagonist, is being unjustly pursued by the police for having stolen bread to feed his starving children. At one point he has taken shelter with a Sister Simplice, a nun with an outstanding reputation for her veracity. She has never in her life told a lie! When the police inspector comes, with Valjean hiding in the next room, Sister Simplice looks the inspector in the eye and tells him a real whopper, that she knows nothing of Valjean. The inspector, knowing Simplice's reputation, goes away without any further investigation of the premises. And the author editorializes that of all the virtuous actions in Sister Simplice's long life, this was the most noble one of all!
The conflict here was between the general principle "lying is bad" and the fact that under the particular circumstances acting on that principle would have caused very unjust results. If a reformer were trying to convince Sister Simplice to change her attitudes, he could have pointed to this episode and said, are you sure that your principle should be that lying is always bad, or should you consider modifying the principle somewhat? Likewise a reformer seeking to convince people that a world government (for example), which is an important part of the Metaconstitution, is a good idea after all may try to show them that the absence of such a world government will inevitably produce specific results that they do not at all think are desirable. The most likely values to which appeal can be made here are the welfare of each person's family and friends, those intimate (gemeinschaft) associates for whom he or she cares as individuals.
The reformer must work with the available materials, including the existing values and beliefs found among people in existing society. By taking advantage of the opportunities created by the lack of reflective equilibrium, the reformer may be able to encourage changes in attitude so that the basic elements of the Metaconstitution will be supported rather than opposed by public opinion. When this process, inevitably a gradual one, has gone far enough, conditions will be favorable for serious reforms.
In addition to institutional inertia and to the lack of imagination which afflicts the general public, reformers face a number of organizational and tactical problems.
It is a good question whether reformers ought to create organizations of like-minded people to work for their goals or not. When you consider how little success a reformer like Henry George got, even though his ideas were very astute, and remember that George never created an organization, it is tempting to conclude that this was a fatal error. Karl Marx, on the other hand, was very interested in organizing, but did not get very good results from that path either. "I have sown dragon's teeth," he complained about some of his followers once to Engels, "but I have harvested fleas!" I am not suggesting that we regard Marx as a reformer, but his comment on the kinds of people attracted to organizations working for change reminds us that they may not always be of the highest caliber. If the reformer is not careful about how and with whom he organizes the movement, he may well end up exclaiming "With friends like these, who needs enemies?" Lenin's solution to this problem, a very small, highly controlled and disciplined organization of conspirators, had many advantages compared with more open, democratic organizations, but Lenin was aiming for change via revolution rather than reforms of the existing order, and a similar kind of organization uniting advocates of the Metaconstitution would be nearly unthinkable.
An organization may develop a momentum of its own and go off in directions that have little resemblance to the intentions of its founders. Perhaps it is in this sense that it has been claimed that Marx was not a Marxist and Jesus was not a Christian. However the disadvantages of not organizing are so tremendous that serious reformers have little choice about the matter. In the immortal words of Benjamin Franklin's famous editorial cartoon directed at the 13 British colonies in North America, reformers must "join or die."
There is no reason, however, why one needs to create a single organization to promote the Metaconstitution. Large numbers of independent groups which approach this goal from different perspectives and perhaps for different reasons may be a preferable form of organization. In terms of religious analogies, the optimum may be a protestant-style multiplicity of organizations sharing certain key values and goals rather than a monolithic, Catholic, centralized single organization. Such a loose collection of organizations is less likely to go off systematically in the wrong direction or to be hijacked by people with ulterior purposes than is a single, centralized organization.
An actual organization of Metaconstitutionalists would not have to be a numerically significant part of the total movement. The Metaconstitutionalists could concentrate on acting as a catalyst to foment useful alliances between other organizations, each of which advocates goals that constitute only a part of the total Metaconstitutional vision. At the beginning of the campaign, there may not be many people who support all of the elements required by the Metaconstitution. Instead, there will be some whose main drive is to promote democracy, some whose interest is in minimizing arbitrary government via the rule of law (but who don't see all of the implications of the rule of law), some who are working for freedom of markets and voluntary associations, and still others who focus on the need for a universal government. Further, there may be groups which advocate particular policies that are consonant with the Metaconstitutional vision, such as flat-rate rather than graduated income taxes, abolition of nationalistic barriers to trade and immigration, public rather than private or governmental ownership of all natural resources, decriminalization of drugs, and ecologically sound limits on the "right" to reproduce.
The Metaconstitutional organization could monitor such organizations, certify ones which conform to Metaconstitutional standards, work to promote cooperation and mutual assistance between such organizations, and generally seek to educate all individuals involved to see how their specific enthusiasm fits into a larger picture. By so working, the Metaconstitutionalists themselves should learn things which enable them to grow and to improve the profundity with which they see the world and the adequacy of the ultimate arrangements which they are seeking to create. The Metaconstitution itself is always subject to refinement and change on the basis of experience and of new developments, by no means all of which can be anticipated in advance. (Let's not close the Patent Office quite yet!)
Organization or no organization, the basic problem facing Metaconstitutionalist reformers is going to be getting people to pay attention to their messages. A world in which we are within striking distance of the Metaconstitution is a world in which there is a great deal of freedom of speech and press. In such a world it may be more difficult to get large numbers of people to think about new ideas than in a more repressive environment. Mass media are inherently very selective in what they choose to transmit. If there is no great demand from audiences for discussion of certain ideas (and it is the unawareness of these ideas that reformers might hope to reduce via the mass media), the media will tend to ignore them unless those who control key media positions themselves have taken an interest in the ideas. Accordingly, developing the interest of at least some key media people ought to be a fairly high reformer priority in the long run..
Unfortunately, media moguls are subjected to so many communications that in self-defense they must learn how to turn a deaf ear most of the time. Because of their great power and prominence, they are also rather unlikely to see their own ideas as in need of improvement, so all in all they do not constitute a very receptive reform target.
In the early days of a Metaconstitutional campaign, therefore, it will be necessary to use communications strategies that either force the mass media to give coverage, or that do not rely on such media. Much of the terrorism and probably nearly all "demonstrations" that go on represent efforts by frustrated change-advocates to capture the attention of an inattentive mass media and bring themselves on to the public agenda. Terrorism is of course totally incompatible with the Metaconstitutional devotion to the rule of law and its opposition to pseudolaw. And in any event, it has not been a very effective means of getting serious attention to noble causes. Rather than sanctifying the terrorism with the noble goals in question, the illegitimate ways of acting almost always serve to tarnish the goal and cast doubt on its legitimacy. Likewise, demonstrations are not a very effective way of propagating the complicated analysis which calls for the proposed reforms. Indeed, the mass media itself is not well-positioned to transmit such arguments, since mass media audiences suffer from extremely limited attention spans.
The hard fact is that at the stage when mass media attention might be most helpful to the reform cause it will be unavailable for practical purposes. It will only begin to amplify the reformers' messages after word has begun to get around anyway.
Fortunately, there are many non-mass media channels of communication in the relatively free societies that are, as noted above, ripe for Metaconstitutionalism. Everybody is free to try to convey new ideas face to face, and there are also many media other than the mass media: local radio phone- in talk shows, local newspapers, university newspapers and radio stations, lecturers, soap boxes in the park, special interest low circulation journals, church pulpits, and so forth. New forms of non-mass media communication are constantly developing, the most important recent examples of which are the Internet and the World Wide Web. Serious reformers must put these available channels to serious use rather than wasting their time in futile attempts to gain mass-media attention before conditions are favorable for this.
My decision to publish this present work on the World Wide Web illustrates both the opportunities offered by the Internet and why we need to take advantage of these opportunities. When I tried to publish the original version of this book in 1992, I was unable to find any book publisher which was even interested in looking at the manuscript. The Web, which was just beginning to come into existence in 1992, now lets me avoid the bottleneck which blocked publication as recently as six years ago.
The bad news is that many people appear to assume that all important ideas and messages are already being picked up by the mass media. One job performed by the media is to weed out crackpot or clearly erroneous ideas and it does not occur to a lot of people that the media may be filtering out a lot more than crackpot ideas.
The upshot is that the people with whom reformers can communicate may not be very disposed to take their ideas seriously unless these ideas are in agreement with those coming through the mass media, which they are not! Consequently a key task for reformers must be to educate people to understand the nature and weaknesses of the mass media so that people become aware that it is not safe to assume that everything they need to know will be available through those channels. Like all political tasks, this will be, in Max Weber's words, "a slow boring of hard boards." But there is no alternative.
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1. Alexander Pope, An Essay on Man (New Haven: Yale U. Press, 1950), pp. 123-124.
2. Bertrand Russell, Human Society in Ethics and Politics (N.Y.:Mentor, 1952), pp. viii, x.
3. H.H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology (N.Y.: Oxford U. Press, 1958), p. 12.
4. Leszek Kolakowski, in Ann Fremantle (Ed.),Communism: Basic Writings (N.Y.:Mentor, 1970), p. 389.
5. Milton Eisenhower, The Wine is Bitter:The U.S. and Latin America (Garden City, N.Y: Doubleday, 1963), p. 148.
6. Henry George, Progress and Poverty (N.Y.: Robert Schalkenbach Foundation, 1955), p. 359.
7. Niccolo Machiavelli, The Discourses (N.Y.:Modern Library, 1940), p. 182.
8. A.G. Wernham (Ed.), The Political Works of Benedict de Spinoza (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1958), p. 201.
9. Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (Garden City, N.Y.: Dolphin Books, 1961), p. 29.
10. George, pp. 404-405. By "rent" George refers to the value of the current use, as distinguished from ownership, of land.
11. Fremantle (1970), p. 52.
12. Ibid., p. 33.
13. Robert A. Heinlein, "Concerning Stories Never Written," in Revolt in 2100 (N.Y.: Signet, 1953), p.186.
14. See John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge: Harvard U. Press, 1971), pp. 48-51.