The confusion of order and measure of crimes is dangerous: Murthers, Traitors and Tyrants, have much gaine by it….As Socrates said, that the chiefest office of wisdome was to distinguish goods and evils. [Essayes, Vol. III, 20.]
In making the above remark, Montaigne was thinking of the evil of drink; today, a more serious cause of the same irresponsible behavior is the evil of power. For:
No excellent minde is freely exempted from some or other entermixture of folly. [42]
It is hard to say how the ancients judged each other, but quick judgment of our fellows is surely a contemporary American weakness. Those who quickly place others in simplistic categories, never hence to remove them regardless of whatever new evidence may be found, should do something that no doubt few do anymore: read Montaigne. He notes in one:
Consultation and deliberation is the beginning of all virtue, and constancie the end and perfection. [Essayes of Montaigne, Vol. III, Tr. John Florio, Ed. Justin Huntly McCarthy (David Stott: London, 1890), 4.]
But do not imagine the relatively modern Montaigne was the one who came up with this gem of an insight: he himself credits it to Demosthenes. Much has long been understood that today seems incomprehensible to almost everyone.
Noting numerous historical examples of unpredictable shifts of temperament, Montaigne warns that “to judge a man, we must a long time follow, and very curiously marke his steps.” [15] He implies that almost anything is possible with almost anyone, so superficial is the reasoning by which we wander through our lives. “No winde makes for him that hath no intended porte to saile unto.” [16]
So let no short-sighted, long-winded politician tell you who is good in this world and who is evil. More often than not, it depends.
My apologies to readers who wonder why I am quoting old-fashioned English rather than the old-fashioned French in which Montaigne wrote. Simply, that’s the book passed down from some unknown relative I happened to chance across on my bookshelf. Someone send me the original French…
Complexity theory is a way of viewing the big picture of a complicated, interdependent process, and most interesting human historical, social, and political processes qualify as examples. At the core of complexity theory lies the insight that such processes are not simply “complicated,” i.e., made up of lots of parts, but “complex,” i.e., made up of parts that interact and adapt to each other’s behavior (e.g., the distinction between a real car and a cartoon “transformer”). While the implications of this for, say, a democratic society that decides to commit aggression to build an empire may be intuitive, it can be difficult actually to pin down the evidence of how political behavior can, say, undergo the phenomenon of counter-intuitive group behavior arising from a particular type of individual behavior or how the various organs of a government can co-adapt and evolve in some new direction.
Soviet dissident Valeriy Chalidze has an interesting example:
Проводится несколько репетиций (1929-1931 гг.): дело вредителей в промышленности (промпартия), дело вредителей в снабжении, дело буржуазных националистов на Украине («Союз вызволения Украины»), дело союзного бюро меньшевиков. Успех превзошёл все ожидания. На каждый «недостаток» в хозяйстве и политике Сталин дал толпе свой тип вредителя, за каждым таким вредителем — своя социальная группа, которую можно ненавидеть, к каждой такой социальной группе можно пристегнуть часть коммунистов. Многое в этих репетициях делается открыто напоказ: чего бояться — дерзкие враги сами признаются. Стадо ликует, жажда зрелищ удовлетворена судебными историями в газетах.
Stalin, Chalidze’s argument goes, wanted to overthrow the whole communist party and replace it with his personal dictatorship, so he started with a series of attacks on small groups (e.g., kulaks or industrialists), destroying each “for the good of the Party,” with the essential connivance of everyone else. The big consequences of the purges of the 1930’s began with the tiny initial conditions of a dress rehearsal political campaign against a minor opponent.
In complex systems such as politics, many revolutions are launched and many opportunities are lost because the potential significance of initial conditions are overlooked.
In response to Sakharov’s first major official effort to caution the Kremlin about the dangers of the monstrous bombs he was responsible for inventing before he gained sufficient moral stature to become a dissident, Khrushchev responded with the following public humiliation (words that only a few years earlier would have been a death sentence):
Leave politics to us–we’re the specialists. You make your bombs and test them, and we won’t interfere with you; we’ll help you. But remember, we have to conduct our policies from a position of strength. We don’t advertise it, but that’s how it is! There can’t be any other policy. Our opponents don’t understand any other language. [Andrei Sakharov, Memoirs (Tr. Richard Lourie), N.Y.: Vintage Books, 1992, 217.]
It should really come as no surprise when politicians are short-sighted bullies who speak only the language of force: whether or not that language is the most effective way to conduct foreign policy, it is indeed the only language that seems effective in a bureaucracy, and politicians either rise through bureaucracies or have to work with them once they have risen.
Is there any on-the-job training for being a leader that could possibly be worse than being a politician?
We believe that it is necessary to know as much as possible about the behavior of the individual and about the simplest forms of exchange….Economists frequently point to much larger, more “burning” questions, and brush everything aside which prevents them from making statements about these. The experience of more advanced sciences, for example physics, indicates that this impatience merely delays progress, including that of the treatment of the “burning” questions. There is no reason to assume the existence of shortcuts. [My emphasis.] [John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern, The Theory of Economic Games and Behavior, as quoted from The Internet Archive.]
So we promptly assert the existence of a shortcut anyway, assume, for example, that nations are billiard balls, and say things like “Iranians only understand the language of force,” the type of argument that is wrong because it ignores individual variation, is wrong because it ignores adaptation, is wrong because it implies without evidence that the assertion would if true somehow distinguish Iranians from everyone else, and is wrong because alternatives have been discounted without being tested.
Speaking of the desperate effort of French workers to grab justice from the self-satisfied elite, Alexis de Tocqueville described what, in current language, might be called “extremists provoking extremism,” a not unfamiliar tragedy:
“Nous perissions, si nous n’eussions ete si pres de perir.”
Si la revolte avait eu un caracgtere moins radical et un aspect moins farouche, il est probable que la plupart des bourgeois seraient restes dans leurs maisons; la France ne serait pas accourue a notre aide; l’Assemblee nationale ell-meme eut peut-etre cede; une minorite de ses membres l’aurait conseille du moins; et l’energie du corps en eut ete fort enervee. Mais l’insurrection fut de tell nature que toute transaction avec elle aprut sur-le-champ impossible et qu’elle ne laissa, des le premier moment, d’autre alternative que de la vaincre ou de perir. [Souvenirs, 221.]
A member of the elite himself, de Tocqueville only reveals without facing up to the implications of his words the degree to which the elite were to blame, when he characterized the working class effort as:
un effort brutal et aveugle, mais puissant des ouvriers pour echapper aux necessites de leur condition qu’on leur avait depeinte comme une oppression illegitime et pour s’ouvrir par le fer un chemin vers ce bien-etre imaginaire dont on les avait berces. [208.]
In his words, one can almost hear white neo-cons discussing Muslims, BP executives discussing the residents of the Gulf Coast, Goldman Sachs executives discussing the 17,000,000 under- or un-employed Americans.
De Tocqueville, speaking about the French regime of which he was a member in the 1840s, a regime nearly oblivious of its imminent collapse at the start of the Revolution of 1848:
L’esprit particulier de la classe moyenne devint l’esprit general du gouernement; il domina la politique exterieure aussi b ien que les affaires du dedans: esprit actif, industrieux, souvent deshonnete, generalement range, temeraire quelquefois par vanite et par egoisme, timide par temperament, modere en toute chose, excepte dans le gout du bien-etre, et mediocre; esprit, que, mele a celui du peuple ou de l’aristocratie, peut faire merveille, mais qui, seul, ne produire jamais qu’;un gouvernement sans vertu et sans grandeur….
La posterite, qui ne voit que les crimes eclatant et a laquelle, d’ordinaire, les vices echappent, ne saura peut-etre jamais a quel degre le gouvernement d’alors avait, sur la fin, pris les allures d’une compagnie industrielle, ou toutes les operations se font en vue du bvenefice que les societaires en peuvent retirer….
Comme toutes les affaires se traitaient entre les membres d’une seule classe, dans son interet, dans son esprit, on ne pouvait trouver de champ de bataille ou de grands partis puissent se faire la guerre. Cette singuliere homogeneite de position, d’interet et, par consequent, de vues, qui regnait dans ce que M. Guizot avait appele le pays legal, otait aux debats parlementaires toute originalite, toute realite, partant toute passion vraie. [Alexis de Tocqueville, Souvenirs (Paris: Ancienne Maison Michel Levy Freres, 1893), 6-10.]
Bureaucratic behavior comes in many flavors – it’s hard to predict until the fine lens of crisis is applied. Then, one discovers what sort of government one has. Speaking of the bureaucratic response to a non-political plague, Albert Camus had this to say about the flavors of bureaucratic behavior:
Mais ils [the bureaucrats] lui [the citizen requesting special consideration] represenaient ordinairement que c’etait aussi le cas d’un certain nombre de gens et que, par consequent, son affaire n’etait pas aussi particuliere qu’il l’imaginait. A quoi Rambert pouvait repondre que cela ne changeait rien au fond de son argumentation, on lui repondait que cela changeait quelque chose aux difficultes administratives qui s’opposaient a toute mesure de faveur risquant de creer ce que l’on appelait, avec une expression de grande repugnance, un precedent. Selon la classification que Rambert proposa au docteur Tieux, ce genre de raisonneurs constituait la categorie des formalists. A cote d’eux, on pouvait encore trouver les bien parlants, qui assuraient le demandeur que rien de tout cela ne pouvait durer et qui, prodigies de bons conseils quand on leur demandait des decisions, consolaient Rambert en decidant qu’il s’agissait seulement d’un ennui momentane. Il y avait aussi les importants, qui priaient leur visiteur de laisser une note resumant son cas et qui l’informaient qu’ils statueraient sur ce cas; les futiles, qui lui proposaient des bons de logement ou des addresses de pensions economiques; les methodiques, qui faisaient remplir une fiche et la classaient ensuite; les debordes, qui levaient les bras, et les importunes, qui detournaient les yeux; il y avait enfin les traditionnels, de beucoup les plus nombreus, qui indiquaient a Rambert un autre bureau ou une nouvelle demarche a faire. [La Peste, (Paris: Gallimard, 1947), 86-87.]
The Formalists: Those who fear creating a precedent
The Smooth-talkers: Those who reassure rather than taking action
The Hotshots: Those too important to do anything
The Trivialists: Those who offer worthless advice
The Paperpushers: Those who offer a form to be filled in and file it
The Overwhelmed: Those who have nothing to offer
The Tired: Those who turn their eyes
The Traditionalists: Those who send one elsewhere
Camus, for whatever reason, omitted one critical type, a type that as a Frenchman, he perhaps considered too obvious to need mentioning:
The Little Stalins: Those who believe it is their mission to command.
Another Frenchman, not coincidentally, beautifully characterized the Little Stalins long before Big Stalin strode the earth. Alexis de Tocqueville, speaking of the ancien regime before the centralization movement of the French Revolution, described the French bureaucracy thus:
Ce qui caracterise deja l’administration en France, c’est la haine violente que lui inspirent indistinctement tous ceux, nobles ou bourgeois, qui veulent s’occuper d’affaires publiques, en dehors d’elle. Le moindre corps independent qui semble vouloir se former sans son concours lui fait peur; la plus petite association libre, quell qu’en soit l’objet, l’importune; elle ne laisse subsister que celles qu’elle a composees arbitrairement et qu’elle preside. [L’Ancien Regime et la Revolution (Gallimard, 1967 ((1859))), 136.]
The above reference to Stalin should of course not be read as implying that French democracy resembled Stalinism, but just that the mentality of the right to control rather than the duty to serve was analogous. Stalin showed us all the danger of such a bureaucratic attitude.
While everyone gets excited about the crisis of the day – perhaps a colonial war of liberation or a terrorist threat, the real threat to the democratic society of the homeland comes from within. The near collapse of French democracy in the 1950s as a result of the cleavages within French society between those insisting on retaining oppresssive French rule in Algeria and those willing to contemplate a compromise with the Algerian Arab public is a case in point with vast lessons for today. Consider these remarks by Albert Camus on one tiny event, the imprisoning of one Jean de Maisonseul on the classically vague authoritarian charge of having committed “imprudences” (surely more than enough reason to toss a man in prison without, in the case, trial or access to lawyers) by advocating an agreement by both Algerian independence fighters and French colonialists that the two sides would cease killing women and children. Note that the imprisoned person was French, not Arab. Chickens come home to roost.
…il faut dire que cet esprit civique a disparu d’abord de nos milieux gouvernementaux, ou le service public est en passe d’oublier s dignite. L’entrainement, l’indifference due a l’usure, la banalite des caracteres, parfois, y ont fiat prevaloir une conception diminuee du pouvoir qui traite alors l’innocent avec desinvolture et le coupable avec complaisance. L’Etat peut etre legal, mais il n’est legitime que lorsque, a la tete de la nation, il rest l’arbitre qui garantit la justice et ajuste l’interet general aux libertes particulieres. S’il perd ce souce, iul perd son corps, il pourrit, il n’est plus rien qu’une anarchie bureaucratisee. [Albert Camus, Chroniques algeriennes 1939-1958 (Gallimard, 1958), 194-195.]…
…les seuls hommes fermes sur leurs devoirs sont ceux qui ne cedent rien sur leurs droits. A plus forte raison, ne pouvons-nous rien ceder sur le droit de l’innocent emprisonne. [p. 196.]
Li Linfu, powerful chancellor of Tang dynasty China from 734 to 752, was renown for his devious ways and honeyed voice, evidently an early master of political correctness. Employing his skills to personal advantage, he ruled by backstabbing all potential competitors (which naturally included all patriotic officials intent upon serving their country) while his emperor focused on the development of new forms of music. (more…)
Writing about the French terror campaign to defeat the terror campaign of the Algerian independence forces (the 20th century one that almost destroyed the struggling French state), Albert Camus made a last-ditched effort to persuade his two homelands—France and Algeria—to overcome their clash of civilizations. (more…)
If it is unfortunately true that sometimes the barbarian hordes really do come charging down without warning from the hill on the horizon, it is nevertheless far more likely that dire threat to “our way of life” will instead saunter smiling straight through the front door. For liberty, silence is death. (more…)
Learning his own history is the free man’s first defense against government abuse of power. (more…)
Conservatives and liberals can probably agree that national power is nice to have; the argument is over how to get it and what to do with it. It is a very old argument. (more…)
Several chapters of de Mailla’s 18th century translation of Zhu Xi’s summary of Sima Guang’s classic 11th century history of China are now on line. One nice little story follows. If anyone knows how to access an online full-text version of the classical Chinese original, please let me know! (more…)
To understand the moral foundations of a good democracy, a decade in jail can be an education… (more…)
Those in command can think top-down or bottom-up, with fundamental implications for the success and morality of policy. (more…)
Whether you view the legal process that occurs when a new reformist or revolutionary or counterrevolutionary regime takes power as engaging in a process of building up a new structure or sliding down a slippery slope, whatever the case, the process is critical, and, as a process, the early steps are most critical. Almost anyone can view the ultimate depravity of a Stalinist or Somocista regime…the way such a regime warps the means of legal process for unprincipled ends…as unjustified and undesirable and counterproductive from the perspective of social good.
But politics does not in practice present such clear choices; rather, one has a new group of evidently sincere and hard-working folks trying to achieve something and facing social, political, and legal obstacles. Perhaps the possibility of terrorism exists.
So what to do? Do they allow a potential terrorist to live free another day or round up hundreds of peaceful citizens who have the temerity to voice criticism? Do they cut a few innocent corners on constitutional guarantees of civil liberties and start listening to domestic phone calls without warrants, checking out what books intellectuals and other potential trouble-makers check out of the library, amass lists of social workers who advocate environmental protections? Aren’t these specific items quite innocent? Wouldn’t cutting these specific corners enable the protection of society, the preservation of democracy, the elimination of a terrorist threat here, a slowing of the process of reform/revolution/counter-revolution there? Are we to slow the pace of politics just to preserve some theoretical principle of freedom? Do we who now have power even have the moral right to allow some academic theorizing to get in the way of the change we have promised to offer to the people?
To answer these questions, it is necessary to examine the initial steps up the reform ladder or, depending on your point of view, down the slippery slope toward totalitarianism. The emphasis here is on “initial steps,” not the extremes of abuse of power that are obvious to all in the most extreme cases. What abuse of power in human history do you find the most egregious? Is is Stalinism, Maoism, Nicaragua’s Somoza, Dominican Republic’s Trujillo, Chile’s Allende? Whatever your choice, studying the standard histories, which focus on the well-known extremes, will teach you little of practical value for preventing such evil from reoccurring. You must examine the initial steps they took, the little unrecorded details at the beginning that historians hardly ever even hear about. The invaluable gift conferred to the world by Solzhenitsyn is his recording of these details, these first steps: this is the place you must look to find warnings of practical value for uprooting in your own society that immortal weed, abuse of power.
In a marvelous little chapter entitled “The Law as a Child,” Solzhenitsyn identifies, via a series of historical anecdotes about long-forgotten legal cases from the first years of the communist revolution just following World War I a series of crimes that the new regime, in the struggle to define a legal system, identified as meriting the severest punishments:
Such “crimes” are the cobblestones with which the road to totalitarian evil is paved. There is no such thing as “left” vs. “right” in politics. The political spectrum in truth is circular – freedom at one point on the circle and a gradually rising abuse of power regardless of which direction you move. The initial steps toward abuse of power are not restricted to liberals or conservatives, Marxists or caudillos, revolutionaries or counter-revolutionaries. Initial abuses of power that grease the way for more serious abuses can be found in democracies resisting terrorism, Islamist crusades against foreign interference, conservative military resistance to peasant revolts.
The number of places such initial steps can be found is amazing: imagine, for a moment, the perspective of a fisherman in Gaza murdered by Israel for launching his boat or a Contra investigator trying to prevent his rebel comrades from abusing peasant girls or an Afghan who sees the Taliban evolve from preventing mujahideen rapes of school girls to throwing acid in the faces of school girls or an Iraqi watching the American bombing of hospitals in Fallujah. Abuse of power is a weed that grows everywhere; the shoots spring from the political soil invisible to all but a few with exactly the right perspective; the longer the shoots of these weeds survive, the faster they grow. Slowly, only very slowly, do they become visible to all, and by then, it is too late.
Does society benefit more from victory or defeat? If the latter, how do we resolve the contradiction between society’s interest and that of regimes, which live off victories? (more…)
Never make the assumption that those in power are there because they have some particular qualification for the position. The fatal incompetence of revolutionary regimes during the prolonged musical chairs game of government in 1848 is a case in point: (more…)
William deB. Mills
