Political scientists and political philosophers seem to be fundamentally irrational by way of an excessive faith in rationalistic a priori‘s; in particular, they are almost willfully dense, on the topic of citizenry and have been since the failure, unlike physics and even mathematics, to reconsider their metaphysical assumptions by way of empirical tests—a single case or event in the real-world which contradicts an alleged absolute truth actually denies that `truth’. The greatest of political thinkers and the ones who smell of shallowness alike assume they can settle the nature of human nature by thinking about men based on ideal thoughts and some vague body of anecdotal evidence a particular thinker has about how capable men are of participating in the government of a village or a large town or a city or a nation-state or even the strangest and most incoherent empire in history (the US).
The Greeks and other ancient thinkers as well as various thinkers from then to modern times left us radically incomplete catalogs and understandings of human political possibilities but those catalogs clearly pointed to these fundamental questions such as: “Is the common man capable of understanding the real situation in radically different human communities such as those of tribal Iraq with its nationalistic leaders, such as Saddam Hussein, trying to form a nation?” Even some with serious historical knowledge don’t seem to realize Hussein wasn’t in the position of a tyrant trying to suppress a `liberal’ society but rather in the position of a William the Conqueror or a Henry II trying to subordinate his fellow-warlords to the needs of a nation. (And we shouldn’t assume that the movement toward modern nations was an unqualified good, but it is the movement Europe and China and India—less successfully—went through and many countries have gone through or are still going through in the so-called Modern Age.)
So, we have a useful ancient catalog of political structures for the purposes of setting up my discussion: monarchy, oligarchy, tyranny, democracy. We could add my favorite as the best possible, if implemented properly: a federated republic—biased toward the assumption of locally concentrated power, authority, and wealth. In any case, I won’t do the analysis here but I suggest the reader should consider these four or five possibilities in light of what they assume about the capabilities of perhaps a specific population of ordinary citizens who might be literate or not, might have access to knowledge adequate for the decisions to be made by responsible voters or might not, and so on. I’ll leave it to the reader to think through the possible capabilities of, perhaps, a well-educated elite which members are formed to high standards of honor—monarchy or aristocracy? That reader might also wish to consider if the West, especially the US, has slipped rapidly through a sort-of populist democracy into the rarely-admired category of oligarchy? But, if that last is true, we don’t really know if the populist politicians might yet use their partial but significant control over the “mob” and the political process to subordinate the bankers.
Let me continue my cartoonish, but serious, analysis of the understanding of human nature in political science and political philosophy. My term `cartoonish’ is actually my refusal to take seriously scholarly analyses which analyze the history of beliefs but pay no attention to the poor grounding of many of those beliefs, and the underlying lines of thought, given what is now known about reality. As one example of a great problem, we now know that man arose inside of nature and whatever capacity he has to rise above `mere’ nature comes from his evolutionary history, isn’t found in equal measure in all human beings, and continues to evolve and develop. When the first “anatomically modern human beings” rose, say about 500,000 years ago or less, that line of creatures co-evolved with his tools and his communities—all that is studied by those who study human being. Those creatures were not simply early versions of modern men who hadn’t quite learned how to mine and refine metals and make metal tools, who hadn’t gotten around yet to writing books on geometry and aesthetics; those creatures weren’t even capable of conceiving of the technology and art and social forms of small villages and wouldn’t have been able to maintain simple huts or to use Neolithic (New Stone Age) tools if they’d been given to those early humans. Iron Age humans, likely including most of those in Africa if they even have reached that level, would not be capable of using modern chemical plants built for them by friendly Europeans and would likely hurt themselves if left to do so; similarly, if they were living in an advanced civilization, such as the West, they wouldn’t be able to deal with the abstractions of the appropriate legal or political systems and would likely act as if they were in a tribal society where justice is a matter of battles and payments between family groups or villages. This latter statement is a pretty good description of what is happening in the United States and much of Europe as the percentage rises of third-world peoples rise and as they and the Africans immorally and mistakenly transported to a human realm beyond the capacity of many and apparently far beyond the capacity of a good percentage of them.
With that as a sketchy background—“cartoonish” has become “sketchy” for those who have enough knowledge and strong enough minds to follow up to this point, I’ll move on.
The strongest tradition of political thought in the West is what might be called `liberalism’, in a general sense.
Some liberals assert that individual human beings are made for self-governance (or not or whatever based on their `intuitions’). This is true of modern collectivist liberals and libertarians and of any modern conservatives who advance far enough to even pretend to think. Neo-conservatives and various sorts of bomb-em liberals claim that as their goal, but we don’t see many prosperous democracies, or even any countries with much in the way of order, among those which have been the beneficiaries of the wars of Neocons or the Bush Republicans or the Clinton Democrats or the Obama whatevers. But among the various sorts of liberalism favored by modern men, there are some rather optimistic versions that preach that the general citizenry could and would respond with some energy and moral responsibility to freer flows of knowledge of various sorts including at least some knowledge of history at the global level and greater knowledge of history at the local level. These liberalisms include classical liberalism and its various libertarian children, revolutionary ideologies such as the rather psychotic ones spreading across the American landscape, and the liberalism of many of the Founding Fathers which was more of a Deism for political geeks than a coherent set of political doctrines.
Traditionally, most conservatives—at least those of intellectual temperaments—were more guarded, preferring to allow for some sort of aristocracy, natural and elected by sane processes or hereditary and selected over past generations. Such a system is imperfect, of course, but a democratically inclined republic has a chance of choosing men more intelligent and more knowledgeable than even a well-informed ordinary citizen so long as men such as John Adams or even that brilliant alcoholic Luther Martin are available rather than, say those crooks—the Dulles Brothers or other Wall Streeters who shaped American foreign policy to the profit of their law-firm’s clients. See The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War by Stephen Kinzer for a discussion of the corruption of the Dulles brothers in this regard. See Tocqueville’s Democracy in America or Nathaniel Hawthorne’s introduction to the original edition of The Scarlet Letter for an early take on the drop-off in moral and other qualities of American leaders after the generation of the Founding Fathers—who themselves had feet of clay—and the proposed explanation that those Fathers chose themselves during a time when only brave men stepped forward while Americans seemed to prefer selecting leaders who were, and are, self-serving scoundrels on the whole.
There is little evidence that wide-spread citizenry rights will lead to a body of voters who take the trouble to learn about the latest target of our moment or decade of hate, country or individual or group. There is no more evidence that such wide-spread rights will lead to citizens who even think seriously about public schools and what is needed for the future of their children and the communities in which their children live and will live. There is certainly evidence that politicians of the scoundrel variety will at least accept decays in public education and will encourage the dropping of voting requirements such as some minimal literacy—I’d be willing to support some reasonable oral display of knowledge and reasoning ability but not the continuous flow of people into and out of voting booths when they don’t even know the Constitution is the law of the land and don’t have a clue what is in that document—if they even know it exists. To be sure, Bertrand de Jouvenel told us decades ago that the American political system was nothing like a self-governing democracy or republic but rather a political machine system which had kept the forms of democratic voting—I’ll not bother splitting (valid and important and thick) hairs over the difference between a republic and democracy. There is enough of decent form in the American political system that it sort-of worked so long as:
- the major parties were putting up candidates often (sometimes?) not too objectionable,
- so long as local parties (often in alliance with the national parties) kept some sort of check on the national boys,
- so long as the American government didn’t overly-extend its constitutional powers domestically or internationally,
- so long as local politicians and newspapers and maybe intellectuals of various sorts were doing their job of speaking something akin to truth to power,
- so long as various other conditions held which no longer hold—at least in a constant way.
Look around for the battles Eugene McCarthy (soft-left) and James Buckley (soft-right) engaged in against the political establishment in the 1970s as “political reforms” were discussed and enacted. Among other claims, one or both said that those reforms were an effort to destroy the partial freedom of state or regional parties and that it was an effort to destroy all forms of corruption not under the control of the two major parties.
Americans, on the whole—including my 20-something self in the 1970s, didn’t pay much attention to what was really happening. Apparently, we—if I was even paying attention—passed right over the details and noticed only the important fact that these bills had some variation of the word “reform” in their titles.
Before and after that increase in major party control of the American political process, things were also going badly even as Americans grew more obsessed with professional sports, even as popular music and literature and cinema and art decayed to a quality suited for a people themselves decaying into a barbarian childhood of sorts—see Ortega y Gasset’s Revolt of the Masses for one entry into high-quality thought on the decay of the West, even as people became entrapped by ever-new technology—good in itself but we have to know when some need has been met and then ignore the marketplace, even as the leaders of nearly all realms of the West—religion and culture and politics and business and education—turned against the traditions of the Christian West and the many adherents and dependents of those traditions. Of course, that inside attack on the West was allegedly for the purpose of making the world a better place but all it has brought the peoples of the world is death or mutilation, poverty to some and increased poverty to others, loss of power… But some have seen an increase in their relative wealth and power though it might be that the total power and wealth of the West have decreased in the most recent decade or two; it seems likely to me that that process of impoverishment and enslavement of the many by the few will increase in the West for as much as a decade or two before the West cracks underneath its morally degenerate leadership.
Why do I speak as if some end of the West were certain? Our leaders are desperate to continue interfering in regions of the world or individual countries where we’ve done little or nothing good for the peoples of those regions or countries, nothing good for the United States or its ordinary citizens; often the United States has done much harm in these regions and great harm to the limbs and lives and psyches or moral characters of our soldiers.
Coming out of Vietnam and with hints that there were problems even in the “Good War,” hints that “Good War” was a bit morally ragged even for the “Good Guys,” Americans proved themselves more inclined to “give it a break” than to try to learn from recent mistakes or even mistakes from decades prior. In his overview of problematic issues regarding World War II which should receive further attention from historians and philosophers and political scientists and politicians and religious leaders and so on, No Simple Victory: World War II in Europe, 1939-1945, Norman Davies, the distinguished and largely retired British historian, expert in Central and Eastern Europe and in that war, tells us that Churchill and Roosevelt look good only in comparison to Hitler and Stalin—which is akin to: Our town’s gangster is a saint compared to Al Capone. I’ve also read in several essays by respected historians that American combat troops had good records with regard to crimes but the unbattled American occupation troops raped and stole with the worst of other country’s soldiers. The death of a million or so German POWs in American camps? The missing ten million German civilians who were fled or were driven out of their homes as the Soviet armies advanced—why were they not listed in documents in the Soviet archives and are the hints valid that they had fled into American controlled regions before disappearing? The American-led overthrow of Mosaddegh’s legitimately elected government in Iran (1953) and his replacement by a nasty lapdog with a national police force reminiscent of the Gestapo? Korea and Curtis LeMay’s admission his bombers killed two million people and leveled nearly every building in what is now North Korea—most of the people died in napalm bombings? Vietnam? Cambodia? Guatemala? Nicaragua? Chile? Pakistan? Iraq? Iran again? Libya? Syria? Yemen?
Why do these people not love us? Why are they so unwilling to let us take control of their countries and reshape them for the good of…
American people, our leaders who think it their right to rule all the Earth are committing these crimes in the name of your country and the immediate (and mostly innocent) agents of these crimes are your sons or that nice, young fellow who was in your Sunday School class. And we Catholics, I’m sure most Protestants as well, pray for our “soldiers who are working for peace around the world.” That’s nothing but a part of our self-deceiving, self-righteous efforts to justify our pandering to the powers of the world, powers which serve God in some way but powers we’re supposed to question—in a pushy way if necessary. The Bible tells us evil men are likely to grab control of great power and wealth; sometimes, good men are corrupted when they hold great power and great wealth.
We sin every time we pray for the success of the American “quest for peace,” and don’t bother to even listen to the horror stories brought back by the men who’d been forced through Hell, sometimes committing crimes to stay alive and sometimes being tricked into committing crimes by planners back in Washington or Arlington, sometimes being the victims of terrible crimes.
The death-toll is tremendous—for the native populations on the ground but there has been a terrible toll of needless deaths and disablement’s, physical and moral and psychological, among Americans and our allies. The destruction to American freedoms, to the proper operation of our governments, to our soft-power (credibility and long-gone reputation as a country), to our individual self-respect and the respect we as individuals used to get from other peoples, to our wealth, has been great and will likely bring the United States down before long, one way or another—we can hope for something as little terrible as a breakup into more stable and coherent nations which might come together again in a century or two.
All of this has been tolerated by American citizens though there are surprisingly honest books about the crimes of our largely self-serving political and business and intelligence(???) leaders. And sometimes military leaders. Psychopath is the term for far too many members of the American elites (and not just in politics) though perhaps many of them aren’t psychiatric psychopaths so much as somewhat selfish people trained to be greatly selfish, egotistical, driven to seek wealth and power or at least an association with those who hold wealth and power. And our religious leaders have kept their mouths shut, though sometimes allowing or even encouraging open dissent against American crimes by clergy.
Criminals will be criminals. An American ruling class willing to carry out regular, large-scale international crimes—mostly war crimes—against other peoples will also be willing to carry out crimes against Americans when it suits their purposes and when they can get away with it. It might seem to some that they can almost always get away with their domestic crimes and pretty much always get away with their international crimes—in fact, it does seem that punishment comes to criminals in the American ruling class only when a competing group of criminals sees a chance to bring down a rival as a result of a domestic fight for power.
It can also be hard to understand the complex and seemingly willful (and morally culpable?) ignorance on the part of Americans when it comes to the unusual, large-scale crimes of the six or seven decades. My experience in talking openly to some people is that there are a small but significant number out there who understand the suspicious nature these crimes; there is also an overlapping number of Americans who are highly suspicious of our country’s international interventions going back to at least the American invasions of the fading Spanish Empire—mostly the Philippines and Cuba. There are also technical specialists such as pilots and other flight experts (including anyone who was a aircraft carrier flight crew or a non-pilot crew member during their military service) who can tell us how unlikely it is that:
- “foreign terrorists” really took down Flight 103 over Lockerbie—see the Time archive for the article Pan Am 103 Why Did They Die? where we learn US military investigators told Time reporters that the CIA blew up the plane to kill a Green Beret traveling back to Washington with information about the CIA’s international drug smuggling operations in Lebanon,
- Flight 800 went down the way the US government claimed; I’ve heard a professional pilot and retired Air Force flight crewman deny it was possible and have read a CIA officer’s account of the rumor among the high-level, sub-political officers of CIA, FBI, etc that it was shot down by accident by an inexperienced Navy pilot who was part of the training exercise taking place from a nearby carrier,
- McVeigh’s van-bomb could have taken down the Federal Building in Oklahoma City—see Gore Vidal’s essay in Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace: How We Got to be so Hated or talk to an honest explosives expert who trusts you—a hint which is very important also for understanding the next entry: modern-day skyscrapers,
- that the hi-jacked airplanes on 9/11 were really flown by amateurs rather than military-quality pilots or (much more likely) electronic controls, that modern building materials could be set aflame by a substance (jet-fuel) which burns at too low a temperature for materials meeting building codes even for low buildings, that there would be no claims against manufacturers and builders if that nearly impossible situation had occurred, that the first-responders who barely came out alive were imagining all the “secondary (not related to the planes) explosions” they said were occurring on lower floors—see 9/11: A Conspiracy Theory for the greatest (that is, wackiest) conspiracy theory a black-humorist or government official could imagine or read a serious article, Ten Short Videos About Nine Eleven which points to videos of testimony by first-responders and by nearby witnesses about explosions in lower-floors which started as the planes were hitting the buildings many floors above—some of those interviews were shown on major television networks or major local stations, or
- that ad nauseum.
Americans can’t govern themselves. They don’t even concern themselves with the crimes committed in their names, crimes which might be thus imputed to them by a God who, despite modern rumors, values justice as well as mercy. They also don’t concern themselves for long with crimes committed against their communal self, crimes which greatly impact a few, leaving the rest to just “give it a rest” and get on with their plans to take the children to DisneyWorld or to Yosemite. That ordinary life has much good in it—though I’m not an advocate of theme-parks, but it has been hollowed out and deprived of its once shaky but okay foundations. And then the next few generations will pay.
The American Age will come to an end as do all things, and maybe very soon, but it could have been kept going a good while and we as a country and citizens could have eased into an honorable role as a country among the, say, five or six most wealthy and most powerful on Earth.
From a slightly different viewpoint: Americans, perhaps like most human beings, tend to accept the facts or pseudo-facts and also opinions without checking even that which can be found in books in local libraries or in their lending partners, by reputable authors and well-established publishers. Moreover, Americans tend to forget what they might have once been told—as is true of the above-mentioned videos shown on national television in which first-responders and others testified that “secondary explosions”, that is—not caused by the planes hitting those two towers, began to occur on the lower floors of the towers about the same time the planes hit high up on the building.
There is no evidence that American citizens have bothered to acquire the knowledge necessary to do their jobs, no evidence they talk about these strange and nasty events (downing planes filled with civilians or the destruction of buildings holding more than 2500 people) with friends. I know some who think themselves skeptical for questioning if the attacks could have been stopped by, say, intelligence and police officers paying more attention to hints of terrorists in the country, but those false-skeptics don’t go any deeper. Their minds are stuck in the idealistic lines of thought they were taught in fifth grade, even the Christians who have read in the Bible (most clearly in Isaiah and Jeremiah) that powerful and wealthy men include a disproportionate number of evil men, men with the “mentality of gangsters” in the phrase of Lord Acton who started off a famous paragraph by telling us such men are almost certain to gain control of centralized power and wealth and ended that paragraph with his famous claim that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. (Thus he covered both those who were evil before gaining power and those who became evil as they held power.)
Americans are naive and innocent in a thoroughly unattractive and morally irresponsible way. So we can learn by paying attention to the events of recent history and those in the preceding half-century and to the ways in which Americans failed to act the role of morally responsible adults. Those in my generation (born 1955) and the two generations before that deserve to suffer for our moral irresponsibility and cowardice but it will be mostly the next few generations which will suffer for our sins—so much for the rumors that the son doesn’t pay for the sins of the father. But much of our distortion of our Christian faith, especially a sinful generation preaching that God is a God of Mercy but not a God of justice, are but efforts to justify our cowardice and sloth.
In my next essay, I’ll examine the possibility that most human beings aren’t up to fulfilling the role of morally responsible citizen in a complex civilization or even in many lesser communities such as nations. By the time we descend to cities and towns and even families, we might discover that many more human beings are capable of fulfilling the roles of morally responsible adults.
So maybe the ordinary citizen isn’t culpable but, if so, only because he’s not capable of being a morally responsible adult at levels higher than family and local communities.