The Lost Massey Lectures (20 page)

The peaceful settlement of a dispute by rational means in due process is certainly better than agitated conflict; but it must be my dispute in my terms, and my representative must be my agent; if, as usual, the issue has suffered a sea-change by being taken out of my hands, and I find that once again I have not been taken seriously, the apparent harmony only increases my anxiety rather than diminishes it. If, on the other hand, a conflict is about what we really mean, it will rouse excitement and anger and may cause suffering, but it will diminish anxiety and be safer in the long run.

Next, let us look at the other side of the medal, the specific community responsibility of corporate groups which they now disregard. At present we make a thing of corporations policing themselves—probably wisely, since external regulation does not work anyway—but of course this can help only to prevent abuses, not to guarantee positive performance. Also, if the spirit is lacking, the flesh tends to default. To give a ludicrous example: when our Congress passed a law requiring fair
TV
coverage on both sides of controversial questions, the broadcasters responded simply by cutting back on controversial programs altogether. (Alas! the bland is also a point of view and sometimes very controversial, but I cannot get the Federal Communications Commission to see it this way.)

But consider the following as a better model. Since our vastly expanding armaments industries create in whole sections and in
millions of workmen a vested economic interest in war, a bill was introduced in Congress—I think by Kastenmeier of Wisconsin—to require armaments manufacturers to prepare plans for alternative peaceful use of the expanded plant as a condition for getting an armaments contract. On this model I have suggested a proposal, that might be applicable in Canada: to countervail the brain-washing inevitable with the vast audiences of mass-media controlled by a few centers, impose a small progressive tax on audience size—a tax for revenue, not to prohibit—to underwrite independent media with rival views. By the same reasoning, corporations that greatly improve their position by technological advances, e.g. automation, have a responsibility to provide relevant education of the young, whose entry into society is made more difficult. At present, of course, these corporations do just the opposite: they urge the public and parents to spend money to train A algebrists whom they will use, after national examinations have weeded out the B's and C's. And they have even managed to get the public to pay for training their semi-skilled workmen, by taking over the job camps of the poverty program.

The advantage of proposals like these is that they constitutionally guarantee countervalence whenever a group begins to have a great influence: the danger generates its own antidote, without punitive machinery which has no positive result and without adding new levels of regulation and administration.

A major means of creating an effective pluralism is decentralization, to increase the amount of mind and the number of wills initiating and deciding. Very many functions of modern society must, of course, be centralized, and in my opinion there are many other functions which should be more centralized than they are now. (I have discussed this question in a book called
People or Personnel
.) On the whole, however, we would be wise at present to decentralize wherever it is feasible without too great loss of
efficiency. Indeed, in a wide range of enterprises, decentralization means a gain in efficiency.

The current style is the opposite: big corporations invade new fields in which they have no competence, just to get contracts, and they will not easily be persuaded to change. Yet a lot could be done by public policy, e.g. to give out public money preferably to small independent firms in Research and Development, urban planning and renewal, and communications. At present, farm subsidies favor big plantations and chain-grocers; they could often as well or better favor smaller farmers and co-operatives. In schooling, a case can be made for the consolidation of rural schools, but there is no doubt that urban systems should be radically decentralized. Many giant universities would have more vitality, and be cheaper to run, if they were allowed to fall apart into their natural faculties and schools. It is indispensable for social work to be administered locally and democratically in order to combat anomie. Neighborhood treatment of mental diseases seems to make sense in most cases. The experience of the Peckham Health Centre in London suggests that it is better for many other parts of medicine. And, as I argued in a previous lecture, many urban problems that are prohibitively expensive and intractable in the city could be better handled in the depopulating countryside and be a grounds for rural reconstruction.

A chief reason to encourage decentralism is just to have a countervailing style of enterprise, one that does not require big capital, grandiose overhead, and all kinds of connections and credentials. The liberal sociologists of pluralism don't understand the matter of style, but many conservatives understand it very well and therefore have much in common with the new radicals. The older “planning” radicalism of the Thirties, however, played right into the present liberal social engineering.

To conclude this series of lectures on the crisis of the American political experiment, populist, pluralist, libertarian, let me say something about our peculiar American libertarianism, which is, I guess—along with our energy and enterprise—what most impresses Europeans about us. As a theme of history, the American kind of freedom has been traced to many things: the Americans were Englishmen, they were yeomen, they were Protestant refugees, they were other refugees, they had an open frontier—all these are relevant. But I am struck also by a constitutional aspect which I like, perhaps, to exaggerate.

Of all politically advanced peoples, the Americans are the only ones who started in an historical golden age of Anarchy. Having gotten rid of the King—and he was always far away, as well as being only an English king—they were in no hurry to reconstruct another sovereign, or even a concept of sovereignty. For more than thirty years after the outbreak of the Revolution, almost nobody bothered to vote in formal elections (often less than 2%), and the national Constitution was the concern of a few merchants and lawyers. Yet the Americans were not a primitive or unpolitical people; on the contrary they had many kinds of civilized democratic and hierarchical structures: town meetings, congregational parishes, masters with apprentices and indentured servants, gentry with slaves, professionals and clients, provincial assemblies. The pluralism goes way back. But where was the sovereignty?

Theoretically, the sovereignty resided in the People. But except for sporadic waves of protest, like the riots, Tea Parties, and the Revolutionary War itself—the populism also goes way back—who were the People? One does not at all have the impression, in this congeries of families, face to face communities, and pluralist social
relations, that there was anything like a General Will, except maybe to be let alone.

Nevertheless, there
is
—it is clear from American behavior—a characteristic kind of sovereignty. It is what is made up by political people as they go along, a continuous series of existential constitutional acts, just as they invented the Declaration, the Articles, and the Constitution, and obviously expected to keep re-writing the Constitution. The founding fathers were saddled with a Roman language, so they spoke of “inalienable rights”; but the American theory is idiomatically expressed by pragmatists like William James: I have certain rights and will act accordingly, including finally punching you in the nose if you don't concede them.

I was recently vividly reminded of the American idea of sovereignty when there were some sit-ins at the City Hall in Detroit and the Governor of Michigan said, in a voice that could only be called plaintive, “There is no Black Power, there is no White Power, there is no Mixed Power; the only power belongs to the government”—I presume that his textbook had said, “The only power belongs to the State.” But there was no mystique in the Governor's textbook proposition; I doubt if anybody, but anybody, took it seriously as an assertion of moral authority, or as anything but a threat to call the cops. On the question of sovereignty, the unmistakable undertone in these incidents is, “Well, that remains to be seen.”

In the context of this pragmatic American attitude toward sovereignty, what is the meaning of the present wave of civil disobedience? Against direct actions like the civil rights sit-ins, the student occupation of Sproul Hall at Berkeley, the draft-card burnings, it is always said that they foment disrespect for law and order and
lead to a general breakdown of civil society. Although judicious people are willing to grant that due process and ordinary administration are not working well, because of prejudice, unconcern, doubletalk, arrogance, or perhaps just the cumbersomeness of overcentralized bureaucracy, nevertheless, they say, the recourse to civil disobedience entails even worse evils.

This is an apparently powerful argument. Even those who engage in civil disobedience tend to concede it, but, they say, in a crisis they cannot act otherwise; they are swept by indignation, or they are morally compelled to resist evil. Or, as I mentioned in my last lecture, they have an apocalyptic theory in which they are acting for a “higher” justice, and the present order is no longer legitimate.

In my opinion, all these views are exaggerations because they assign a status and finality to the sovereign which in America it does not have. If the State is not quite so determinate, then the insult to it does not necessarily have such global consequences. Certainly the American genius, whether we cite Jefferson or James and Dewey more than a century later, is that the State is in process, in a kind of regulated permanent revolution.

Empirically, is it the case that direct actions which are aimed at specific abuses lead to general lawlessness? Where is the evidence to prove the connection, e.g. statistics of correlative disorder in the community, or an increase of unspecific lawless acts among the direct activists? The flimsy evidence that there is tends to weigh in the opposite direction. Crime and delinquency seem to diminish where there has been political direct action by Negroes. The community and academic spirit at Berkeley has been better this year than it used to be. In 1944 the warden of Danbury prison assured me that the war-objectors penned up there were, in general, “the finest type of citizens!”

On sociological grounds, indeed the probability is that a
specific direct action, that cuts through frustrating due process, and especially if it is successful or partially successful, will tend to increase civil order rather than to destroy it, for it revives the belief that the community is one's own, that one has influence; whereas the inhibition of direct action against an intolerable abuse inevitably increases anomie and therefore
general
lawlessness. The enforcement of law and order at all costs aggravates the tensions that lead to explosions. But if place is allowed for “creative disorder,” as Arthur Waskow calls it, there is less tension, less resignation, and more likelihood of finding social, economic, and political expedients to continue with.

Of course, this raises a nice legal question: how to distinguish between a rioting mob and citizens engaging in creative disorder? Theoretically, it is a rioting mob, according to the wisdom of LeBon and Freud, if it is in the grip of unconscious ideas of Father or the need to destroy Father, if it is after senseless power or to destroy senseless power. Perhaps it is a group of confused Americans if it is demanding to be paid attention to, and included, as the first step of political thinking. Perhaps it is petitioning for a redress of grievances, even if it has no writ of grievances to present, and even if there is no sovereign to petition. In any case, the part of wisdom is to take people seriously and come up with a new idea that might make a difference to their problems. If the governors won't, or can't, do this, then we must do it. I am often asked by radical students what I am trying to do with all my utopian thinking and inventing of alternatives; perhaps the use of intellect is to help turn riot into creative disorder.

In brief, contrary to the conventional argument, anarchic incidents like civil disobedience are often essential parts of the democratic process as Americans understand it. So it was understood by Jefferson when, after Shays's rebellion was disarmed, he urged that nobody be punished, for that might discourage mutiny in the
future, and then what check would there be on government? So, in milder terms, it has been recently understood by the pragmatic Court, where many cases of apparently obvious trespass and violation have turned out to be legal after all, and only subsequently made legal by statute. This is not, I believe, because the Court has been terrorized or has blinked in order to avoid worse evils, but because in rapidly changing circumstances, there is often no other way to know what the Constitution is.

Finally, I need hardly point out that in American rhetoric, American freedom—in an anarchic sense—has been held to be the philosopher's stone of our famous energy and enterprise. Moss-back conservatives have always spoken for laissez-faire as the right climate for economic progress (though, to be sure, they then connive for tariffs and subsidies, hire strikebreakers, and form monopolies in restraint of trade). Radical liberals have cleaved to the Bill of Rights, for to be cowed by authority makes it impossible to think and experiment. Immigrants used to flock to the United States to avoid conscription, as some of our best youth now go to Canada. They came because there were no class barriers, and because there was open opportunity to make good in one's own way. And every American kid soon learns to say, “It's a free country—you can't make me!”

By and large, let me say, this rhetoric has been true. Anarchism is grounded in a rather definite social-psychological hypothesis: that forceful, graceful, and intelligent behavior occurs only when there is an uncoerced and direct response to the environment; that in most human affairs, more harm than good results from compulsion, top-down direction, bureaucratic planning, preordained curricula, jails, conscription, States. Sometimes it is
necessary to limit freedom, as we keep a child from running across the highway, but this is usually at the expense of force, grace, and learning; and in the long run it is usually wiser to remove the danger and simplify the rules than to hamper the activity. I think, I say, that this hypothesis is true, but whether or not it is, it would certainly be un-American to deny it. Everybody knows that America is great because America is free; and by freedom is not finally meant the juridical freedom of the European tradition, freedom under law, having the legal rights and duties of citizens; what is meant is the spontaneous freedom of anarchy, opportunity to do what you can, although hampered by necessary conventions, as few as possible.