The state as we know it in the United States and most countries in this year of 2011 can’t be limited without destroying that state. This is because — in Jeffersonian terms — the state as it currently exists in most countries is an instrument of a vague group of human beings which we could call the predatory class; these morally disordered creatures have taken control of the governments of these modern states. This current generation of predators are certainly good at destroying, even at the level of entire countries, but not so good at even profiting from that destruction, let alone being good at building something worthwhile.
How did this happen? As badly behaved as the British government was at times in the 1700s and 1800s, it never was guilty of that sort of mass-murder and destruction of the infrastructure of entire countries.
C.S. Lewis once claimed that Hitler and Stalin had not lost. In the way the West chose to fight them, the peoples of the West became the disciples of those brutal men who were much better at destroying than at building much that was useful let alone good or beautiful. The leaders of the modern West are very much in this mold. However much they like to soak in their own morally-advanced juices, they know only destruction, the reduction of enemies to submissive, quivering creatures and the reduction of sewage systems and hospitals to piles of rubble.
To save these states, the United States and Germany and so forth, legitimate governments would have to be formed by some morally well-formed human beings from the producer class, preferably having formed smaller-scale groups with interests and legal rights tied to the future. Then they would have to take over and powerful, greedy men are rarely thrown out of power without the type of violence which simply places a different group of powerful, greedy men into power, but that’s not a set of issues that I can discuss in this short essay.
More importantly and relevant to the themes of this essay: I see no signs that the ordinary citizens or even the most capable of producers have learned much. If the United States is rescued as a prosperous republic by some miracle, the American citizenry would allow another predatory takeover of the United States so long as the new predators were careful to appeal to the fears and desires dominant in the public marketplaces of our sad, sad days. I imagine the situation is little different in other parts of the West.
I’ll sidetrack a small bit to give a warning to the wary: membership in the class of predator or that of producer isn’t pre-determined but is, at least partly, taken on. Nor are most of us pure producer or pure predator. To use some oversimplified historical examples from a crucial period of American history: Henry Ford — despite some rough characteristics — was almost a pure producer of wealth, Andrew Carnegie probably had a bit more predator in him, John D. Rockefeller proved he could be a producer but opted to become largely pure predator, and J.P. Morgan was a predatory financier from the start to end.
The modern movement towards democracies and republics which has led to the state as we know was largely enabled by the freeing of community members to be individuals under kings and some early advocates of democratic or republican forms of governments. This process was partly driven by offers on the part of power-seekers to relieve the troubled of some of their suffering. It was also partly driven by the mobility of opportunity and the overlapping mobility caused by the chance to escape various forms of persecution. The first cause is more important to my current thought and I’ll ignore the ways in which communities dissolved or weakened simply because their members left for better opportunities or at least the dream of such.
The modern state has continued to secure its power by offering help to those suffering from abuses of power in smaller-scale communities. How many fathers are abusive? It doesn’t matter to the leaders of modern states and their employed do-gooders any more than it mattered to King Louis XIV and his do-gooders in the 17th century or any other would-be tyrants in history who have sought power by shattering natural human communities. So long as the modern state can elicit complaints from some allegedly abused children, you can interfere in all families. This is a game American politicians are good at, so good they’ve taken their show on the road managing, for example, to show the world some of the bad and some imaginary bad done by Saddam Hussein before moving in to wipe out all the good he’d done without more than a show of healing the damage he’d done to his country. (Iraq had good infrastructure before the American military destroyed it, that is, destroyed sewage systems and fresh-water systems and schools and hospitals.)
In all likelihood, as I said above, the American citizenry and the citizenry of other countries of the West would fall for this sort of a routine once again and the related routine offering of government jobs to more than can be supported by the rest of the population. I’m not saying that all government jobs are useless or dangerous. In fact, in alliance with politicians, such legitimate workers as doctors and ditch-diggers have grabbed a large enough share of the economy to cause damage. And then there are bankers… Nuff said
In any case, politicians have the power and ambitious, stupid politicians have the motive, to make governments excessively large. Nathaniel Hawthorne pointed out in the 1850s, in the introduction to The Scarlett Letter that Americans will seek promises of financial security of this sort and are quite willing to sell their liberty in return for government jobs and other such frauds. Our moral characters haven’t gotten any tougher since then.
This would indicate that a general regime of individual freedom isn’t going to work the next time either, though I think other possibilities exist which don’t lie on that simplistic spectrum of possibilities from individual freedom of the modern libertarian (or 19th century liberal) variety over to modern style tyrannies, but let me zag a bit now that I’ve zigged — as is my custom.
I’ve been very critical in the past toward my fellow Americans — that is, ordinary citizens and not power-seekers — and toward others in the West and I probably shouldn’t have been. The Bible tells me, the Catholic Church and nearly all Christian churches tell me, that most of the brethren of Jesus Christ are sheep, not shepherds and not even brave by the limited standards of sheep. This helps us to understand what’s at stake with some of the important questions I’ve tried to raise when I address political and moral issues.
Why do we let legitimate governments mutate into cancerous masses? Are we so taken in by the big show of federal money to put fancy swimming pools into schools not able to teach basic skills of reading and writing? Sure it is that the pools were intended to improve the physical fitness or make up for past prejudices against some racial or ethnic or religious groups. Or at least the politicians lead us to believe they are truly compassionate and devoted to the public good. At the same time those state-centered leaders do what they can to destroy the authority of those communities which have retained enough coherence to remain true communities in the face of the state and its allies in Hollywood and on Wall St.
As I’ve been doing for several months, I’ll turn to The Liberal Mind by Kenneth Minogue, seeking to cast some light upon our modern mess:
[I]t is characteristic of liberalism to make politicians of us all; and in this case we find liberalism promoting alertness to trends among the population at large. Indeed, to be liberal is to accept an obligation to be concerned with matters beyond our direct responsibilities. [page 109]
In these words, I find a strong pointer to another reason for seeking to be a member of a concrete, local community which is represented in centralized governments rather than being an individual member of an abstract, fluid herd voting for a morally compromised product of political machining. Those whose primary energies are devoted to family and local communities, those who devote more of their remaining energies to following professional football than to the most casual readings about the countries recently invaded by the armies of the West, troop off to elect the scoundrels who will decide which countries we’ll invade over the next few years. By making government the work of all, at least for one day every year or two, our political masters have made sure government isn’t the special work of those who know enough and have the qualities to protect those who belong to their communities. We have also, borrowing from Thomas Jefferson, developed a “perverse literacy” in ourselves and this has led to an “invincible ignorance” which leads most to pay no attention to the thoughts of those few who’ve bothered to learn something about the modern world. The invincibly ignorant feel it good enough to learn a few convenient talking points and to maybe learn something about the issues as defined by policy wonks who live in a world where the nomads of Afghanistan are no more than pawns in political games played in Washington and London and Rome.
There are a lot of things going on in the modern world. There are a number of long-ignored problems which are developing into festering sores the size of Mt. Etna. Meanwhile, we allow ourselves to be taught that any Vietnamese or Iraqi peasant who shoots a heavily armed American in his backyard is an evil creature and we concern ourselves with so-called issues which have little to do with reality and a lot to do with the egos and squabbles of those who live in political snake-pits.
So: What is going on in our day and age? What should we be doing, for example, to return the West to some path of moral and intellectual sanity?
I don’t think we can understand our world by laying matters out in a schematic form. There’s a story going on, a story being told by God, and it’s not a matter of intuiting a priori or any other metaphysical truths, but rather a matter of paying attention to the actual past, on evolutionary and historical and annual scales, and trying to figure out the nature of the physical surroundings and the nature of the characters and the types of events which move the story along smoothly and the types which disrupt the story in various ways. Let me zig again to quote Professor Minogue on his use of `state’ to refer to a legitimate form of society and associated government:
The State is not an aspect of society; it is the only unity that society can lay claim to. [page 131]
This is as good an excuse I can find for a somewhat delayed retreat from my recent tendency to take the libertarian understanding of `state’ as something always bad, always imposed upon a population who should be free of central authority. Let me take a definition of state, from an older and more solid dictionary (Webster’s 1913 dictionary from The Collaborative International Dictionary of English v.0.48):
State: A political body, or body politic; the whole body of people who are united under one government, whatever may be the form of the government; a nation.
The definition says nothing about where power originates which would seem to be the entire problem; certainly, the origin and nature of power, as well as the need to protect it from the inordinately greedy and ambitious, was the major political problem of their day for some prominent Founding Fathers of the United States and most especially John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, in their work as Founders and also in their correspondence during their years of retirement. It is also clearly a major problem in to some highly-regarded advocates of liberty such as William Lecky and John Dahlberg (Lord Acton), and others who occupied islands of sanity and intelligence in this modern desert. For an intimidating list of books by serious students of these issues — including Lecky and Dahlberg, see The Online Library of Liberty. Many of these books are out of copyright and available for free download as pdf files.
I admit to still having some reluctance to use `state’ in that sort of good sense, however tentative and qualified that goodness, perhaps because I started coming to some dim awareness of my political environment during the years of the American war against the Vietnamese people followed by Watergate followed by the disasters we know as the Ford and Carter administrations — Monday morning quarterbacks can see these disasters were largely, though not entirely, caused by Johnson and the criminal way he financed a criminal war. Then, things seemed to get much better and, like many of my generation, I was lulled to sleep by the future-eating prosperity of the mid-1980s through 2000 or so. (Actually, I was a little ahead of the game, waking up to our dangerous situation around 1990 but that was forced by some crises in my personal life.)
As a young and very confused advocate of conservative thought and behavior, I had hopes that Reagan would re-establish something like the decent and fairly well-ordered small-town world I’d known as I grew up in the 1960s and early 1970s. I was under the illusion for a few years that this had truly happened and then, for another ten years, under the illusion the Reagan Revolution had been for real and betrayed after the fact by Bush and other Republicans. Oddly enough — in retrospect — I can see the world I longed for was a somewhat mindless world which wasn’t so good for me but that’s another story I’ve at least hinted at in other writings. There’s now historical evidence, including testimony from Paul Craig Roberts and Angelo Codevilla, that Reagan had honestly planned to do what he promised in his first election and his administration had been somehow bullied (don’t know what the threat was) into accepting George H.W. Bush and other pro-statist insiders who proved to be saboteurs of the most treacherous sort. I knew there were traitors to Reagan and to the American nation as a whole but didn’t know how early they’d done their work. Murray Rothbard has also written of Reagan’s campaign promises to cut back on the power of the bankers and their creatures in the Council for Foreign Relations, Trilateral Council, etc. David Rockefeller obtained a one-on-one meeting with Reagan after he’d won the election and Reagan appointed a cabinet dominated by charter members of the Trilateral Council, such as Schultz and Weinberger.
In retrospect, things look very bad for any who would speak of the American state as being a morally ordered community, one caring for all its members and — at the very least — maintaining a level playing field. But we should remember that failures in a dynamic world of evolution and development don’t mean that the effort was wrongly directed. It might be that multiple tries are needed for one reason or another. In other words, our failures are likely the failures of creatures living in the early stages of an evolutionary process, a process in which a variety of social relationships are forming and a variety of ways of stabilizing those relationships are coming and going. The American State as we know it is going, probably pretty fast. Such is true of most of the states in the West as well as those around the world, even in the Orient, which have modeled themselves upon some orthodox or heretical view of political systems advocated in the academic and journalistic communities in New York City or Paris and sometimes actually tried in the American State or the Soviet State or the Italian Fascist State.
If the nets of salvation are to gather in many, communities of various sorts are needed to care for the many who don’t have the initiative or the talents to explore Creation and to think through what they discover. Communities of various sorts are needed for the blind and the timid — if they are to be saved. That is to say — human communities must care for the weak and cowardly in the flock. After all, God could have created a world which would have terrified and broken the strongest and most hardheaded of men. By God’s highest standards, all human beings are lacking in intelligence and initiative and courage and faith, but, in His mercy, He has set lower standards for us.
I’m now ready to claim that we need some form of the state to compensate for weaknesses and to satisfy positive desires of the members of the Body of Christ. I’m also claiming that God will give us what is needed for that Body.
What then has gone wrong with the state in recent centuries? Let me just hint at an answer by addressing one specific problem I see in our efforts to form communities and to govern those communities.
The problem with the United States is not that we’re currently paying no respect to the Constitution written in 1789 but rather that we think it possible to so structure a growing and developing community, political or otherwise. The Catholic Church has a similar problem as do many other communities of Christian or other nature. The Pope is less the father of a growing and developing community — as most recent Popes would prefer to be — and more the king of a community assumed to be frozen into a structure that it will take on in heaven. We maximize the dangers and damages of rapid change, and lose all control over our most immediate future, when we treat the United States and the Catholic Church and so many other human communities as frozen structures. It would be dangerous, and an intellectual error, to assume a community is the same as an individual organism but it’s a simple observational truth that they are similar in many ways, including the fact that they are developing entities rather than entities which can be designed at one time for all time. No wise parent determines details of their child’s life when that child is but an infant. Even in the most traditional of societies, the farmer’s son might become an apprentice to a blacksmith, the farmer’s daughter might have to learn how to arrange the more complicated, if more luxurious, life of the household of a major merchant. We don’t know what God’s world will offer us or thrown at us, as individuals and as communities. To predetermine our responses is to live yesterday’s life in tomorrow’s world, it is to be planning to drive a horse-and-buggy in a world which suddenly is building interstate highways. In the realm of politics, it also to put your children’s life under the control of men who have learned the tricks of gaining and using, or abusing, power in such a mindless society.
Political structures — indeed, all communities — evolve in the way of stories rather than being entities from a short list given to us, once and for all time, by Aristotle. To a Christian, the proper form of a state is that which serves the Body of Christ, as a whole and as a collection of individuals. The proper form of a state isn’t that which enables efficient economic development, though competent and wise statesmen wouldn’t interfere in matters not directly the business of the state. The proper form of a state isn’t one which allows ambitious men to stride as glorious conquerors across the stages of history, though such men play a role in that history perhaps similar to the role of various brutal predators in the story of biological evolution. The proper form of a state isn’t one which either interferes with religious matters nor one which serves human religious institutions. I have even come to believe the Christian Church herself is but one organ in the Body of Christ though a particularly important organ. In this mortal realm, it may well be proper that the Church and state are wary of each other as their overlapping roles develop.
In any case, we need some sort of centralized political authority, something which corresponds vaguely to our current idea of a state, but we don’t really know what form that state should take on and we certainly don’t know how to build one. But that’s part of our problem. We think to build such a complex entity when it needs to evolve and develop. We need to learn how to be energetic and intelligent characters in a story rather than strange engineers designing the future of our communities as if designing a road-system.