Max Weber once defined states as "human communities that successfully claim the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory." The keyword here is "legitimate." If a scruffy man in a
trucker hat were to pistol-whip you and demand your money for "a good cause,"
you might be justifiably suspicious about his motives, whereas the state does
effectively the same thing (with lot of programs that either offer the taxpayer
no obvious benefit, or
obviously benefit some people while completely
ignoring others), we regard the experience as one of the few certainties in
life - and have been doing so since the Bronze Age. To a certain extent, we
even sympathise and identify with the process. When we read about someone who's
going to jail for some particularly clever piece of tax evasion, many of us are
pleased that a cheater got pwned.
As it turns out, some of this may have a stronger
sociological basis than
previously believed, but you still don't have to buy into all of this
Dawkinsian gamistry to accept the basic premise: people are more trusting when
they feel more secure about the basis of that trust. And not only does the
human impulse to altruism appear to be inseparable from the morality (i.e. the
belief that cheating should be penalized), it appears we're also capable of
distinguishing intuitively between ethical injunctions and mere dictates. For a
start, we are considerably more likely to remember the former (as Ian Glynn
relates in his
Anatomy of Thought); it is as though belief in the
legitimacy of
some ordering authority were built into us, and states an
inevitable and completely natural outgrowth of our biologically-engineered
social behavior.
Still, before the appearance of what we call the state, much
of the Western world was ruled by chiefdoms, which were characterized by
pervasive inequality (by which I mean rigid, hereditary class systems) and
centralization of authority. For many people living under chiefdoms, the
"legitimacy" with which Weber characterizes states, was still the province of
tribal leadership even though the leaders of subjugated tribes often had little
status in the larger society and no official authority. Essentially, while
outsiders and members of the underclass were forced to obey the "mere dictates"
of the chief and the elites, they granted the actual moral authority over
themselves - the "legitimacy" or, if you want, normative power - to those in
whom they actually trusted.
Such is the way of the human custom of reciprocal altruism:
it isn't
quid pro quo exactly. It's the willingness to give of
ourselves, our resources and our rights on the basis that the beneficiary would
do the same for us. Thus the ideals of the modern liberal state have always
served a dual function: emphasis on equality and the rule of law helps citizens
by protecting their ethical interests, and by protecting its relationship with
the individual citizens, the state ensures its "legitimacy." People respect the law when they feel it
respects them.
This sort of public faith is a delicate thing. One reason
why dictatorships have tended paradoxically towards social disorder is that
when the state overtly and unapologetically exercises force in service to very
narrow interests, those not honored by the reigning social order often transfer
their loyalties elsewhere - to tribal leaders or religious authorities, to
gangs or revolutionary groups, or to other countries entirely. The same thing
happens to a lesser extent in merely corrupt societies: people get cynical
about what the state (and the larger society) actually has to offer them, and
they lose interest in offering anything in return.
When a society disintegrates like that, the state itself
risks regressing into chiefdom - that is, an arbitrary, coercive, unjust,
nepotistic and venal regime - and succumbing to the violent, cyclical
instability that is its main characteristic. Again, all of this is pretty
obvious: in places where people feel that the state (and the larger society) is
distant, arbitrary and possibly hostile to them, crime and civil unrest soars.
That's the case with a lot of the Middle East, where oil money and shady Cold
War politik empowered a class of chiefs who treat their subjects brutally and
cynically. It's also the case with Mexico, which is an embarrassment given the
bizarre notion our politicians have that America brings prosperity and birdsong
and such everywhere it goes.
Of course, at the rate we're going, we could be next. I know
that I feel cynical when I try to imagine myself in a reciprocal altruism
relationship with the American government (terrible mental image, by the way).
I wonder to what extent the money I give up in income taxes is going to any
cause
I approve of, or could even identify with. Yet, the government and its
loyalists ask a lot of
us. For example, the Bush administration expects
us to play along with its little wiretapping, data-mining terror hunt
adventure. Congress and the courts continue to hand over greater and more
extensive powers to local law enforcement, even as law enforcement demonstrates
less and less accountability. And the radical boosters of the New American
Century project have advocated starting more wars and
reinstating the draft,
presumably because they think it would restore a sense of patriotic duty in
the nation's decadent, nihilistic youth.
Speaking of decadence and nihilism, it is now impossible to
keep track of the number of books published each year decrying the "social
decay" evident in our culture. Seemingly an entire cottage publishing industry
exists to produce and promote this sort of material. Every kind of pundit has
had a go at it, but especially the Far Right has been enjoying the last few
years of gloom-and-doom - ironic given the Republican majority and all that.
So, practically everybody agrees that America is going to hell in a plastic
bag, but no matter who we elect, matters only seem to worsen. Conservatives
blame popular culture, and liberals blame capitalism - but aren't these both
essentially facets of the same thing?
I propose a different explanation: faith in state and
society is on the decline, due to a combination of inequalities produced by our
current economic model and a political process that people no longer trust to
help them cope with these. Of course, we've had the former before, most notably
during the Great Depression, but whereas that era saw the appearance of the big
labor unions and an unprecedented rise in socialist politics, in our era there
is nothing on a corresponding scale to compare to it. Indeed, of all our
classes the working class seem the least interested in political solutions to
their economic problems (compare to the rich, who contribute yearly to
thousands of foundations devoted to furthering their specific economic
interests). A partial explanation for this lies in the famous American mistrust
for socialism, but I believe that to an even greater extent, people at the
bottom simply do not believe that the political process will reward their
effort.
And why should they? The representatives of the political
process haven't shown good faith. For example, the War on Drugs has militarized
the police against the lower classes, and while they purport to be at war with
only the subset of people who deal in controlled substances, everyone knows
that collateral damage is a fact of all wars. Drug warriors have made countless
errors that ruined peoples' lives and livelihoods, and have practically never
apologized for it. The military has shown more contrition over wrongs done in
foreign countries than our police and enforcement agencies do here. Above all
else, the War on Drugs has succeeded in creating the impression that the
political class neither understands nor cares about the actual troubles of the
lower classes.
The drug war is, of course, only one of many examples, but
it serves as a particularly illustrative one because of the way politicians
fail to understand it. Social conservatives (and their contemptible allies in
the Democratic Party) habitually blame a "lack of toughness," but this
explanation rings hollow in an era of no-knock SWAT raids and attacks on
private parties by officers with assault rifles. If anything, toughness has
increased as drug enforcement has become the standard for all law enforcement in
America. Is more zero-tolerance really what we need to restore Americans' sense
of cooperation and community? Will more zero-tolerance result in a nation with
a sense of shared mission, in which young people will be happy to serve in
whatever capacity they are asked? I don't think that any example from history
should lead us to believe that this will be the case.
Authoritarians (on either side of the political aisle) are
likely to argue that this point is irrelevant, that duty is duty precisely
because you are compelled to do it whether or not you believe in it. This is
fundamentally a defensive stance. I believe that, if pressed, even these
individuals would rather a society in which more people trusted one another
enough not to break the rules willfully.
I don't mean to moralize. Actually, my entire point is that
the flood of anger and reproach from the politically-active classes is futile
and counterproductive. Guilt and indignation are not the necessary
prerequisites for cooperation; in fact, trust is the necessary prerequisite for
all of those. People aren't born into the duties of citizenship, they are
initiated
into them, and most of us
never were - our "shared national experiences"
of tax-time and public school notwithstanding. To expect, as social
conservatives seem to, that it is sufficient simply to legislate against
"decadence and nihilism" is as silly as legislating that oranges be lemons and
expecting to effect a revolution in agriculture. It may be morally satisfying,
but it ignores the reality of human nature.
If the politically-active classes want to restore Americans'
sense of national duty, they should begin by reforming the way the American
state interacts with its citizens. Only after the myriad small oppressions
created by apathy and bad faith are corrected will the average American come to
appreciate the responsibilities of citizenship.