Thieves of State: Why Corruption Threatens Global Security (26 page)

Writing forty years later, John Locke used the discipline of logic to advance this line of thinking, in two “Treatises of Government.” He criticized monarchy, “where one man, commanding a multitude, has the liberty to be judge in his own case, and may do to all his subjects whatever he pleases, without the least liberty to anyone to question or control those who execute his pleasure.” The very objective of government, Locke wrote, is “setting up a known authority to which everyone of that society may appeal upon any injury received.”

He went on to discuss the best apportionment of governmental duties and modes of operation for branches carrying out different functions. The legislative power, he concluded, was best “placed in collective bodies of men, call them senate, parliament, or what you please.” He discussed the need for majority rather than unanimous votes, why a legislature
needn’t remain in permanent session, while executive must be exercised continuously, and he began the intricate task of determining the relative supremacy of different branches of government.
⁴⁵

In this way did Locke and other political theorists of his day continue the work of replacing God, in ordering human affairs, with a mechanism devised by human reason. And they began sketching the shapes of the gears and rods that made up that reason-based contraption.

A
MONG
P
ARLIAMENT’S
supporters during the English Civil War were seven of the ten young men who made up the first graduating class of Harvard College. They, along with many other Americans, sailed to England to take part in the struggle against absolutism. Some went on to take up key positions in the short-lived English republic.
⁴⁶

Americans avidly read Locke as well as later writers who expanded his ideas—notably the brilliant French philosopher Montesquieu, whose compendium
The Spirit of the Laws
shaped much of the colonists’ exploration into how a rational government should be structured. The birth of the United States was deeply influenced by the previous two centuries’ events in northern Europe.

In the context of the achievements of their Dutch and English forebears, the American’s originality lay not so much in throwing off the yoke of monarchy, or in declaring all men equal and endowed with rights that they could not give up even if they wanted to. Those points had already been made. Where the American revolutionaries broke truly new ground was in the engineering work they did on the rational mechanism designed to promote those rights and ensure appeal against abuse. The delegates to the American constitutional convention seemed to have felt that if they could tool the gears of government just right, then justice, prosperity, and tranquility would
have
to ensue.

By the time their representatives met in Philadelphia to amend the Articles of Confederation that loosely bound the thirteen former British colonies, Americans had amassed a lot of experience in designing governments. Each of the states had drafted at least one constitution. They had tried unicameral and bicameral legislatures, different electoral procedures and lengths of office, and especially, different trade-offs
between curbs on tyranny and means of forestalling anarchy (or too much egalitarianism).

The mere fact of holding elections, Americans already knew, was not sufficient to guarantee people’s rights. That truth—that an election per se is less important than the architecture within which it takes place—played out in the painful struggles that took place in Arab Spring countries after their revolutions.

James Madison, a key proponent of a more “energetic” national government, saw elaborate, interlocking elements as the best protection against a strong government’s potential excesses. “A government composed of such extensive powers,” he wrote to George Washington on April 16, 1787, “should be well organized and balanced.

The legislative department might be divided into two branches; one of them chosen every ___ years by the people at large, or by the legislatures, the other to consist of fewer members. Perhaps the negative on the laws [veto] might be most conveniently exercised by this branch. As a further check, a council of revision including the great ministerial officers might be superadded.
⁴⁷

For the next five months, such details and many more were probed and considered, modified and adopted or discarded.

As delegates broke out into two main groupings during the course of the debates, it was the “Antifederalists”—those suspicious of concentrated national power—who also recoiled at the elaborate devices Madison or John Adams favored as checks on concentrated power. One writer disagreed with the Federalists’ presumptions of inherent human self-interestedness—the belief that government officials, as he put it,

will ever be actuated by views of private interest and ambition, to the prejudice of the public good; that therefore the only effectual method to secure the rights of the people and promote their welfare is to create an opposition of interests [within the government].

For this Antifederalist, a better way to guarantee public integrity was through personal morality (and the absence of acute income inequality):
“A republican or free form of government can only exist where the body of the people are virtuous, and where property is pretty equally divided.”
⁴⁸

The Federalists’ more jaundiced view of human nature won out. Indeed, the most widely accepted argument against the draft constitution was its lack of explicit safeguards of basic rights, such as those in the Dutch charters or the Magna Carta. With that vice remedied by the promise of a ten-article Bill of Rights, the Constitution was adopted.

A
ND IN THIS FASHION
, over the course of about two centuries—with rich input from the great European revolution in thinking called the Enlightenment—a constitutional form of government was slowly hammered out. It was an alternative to rule by princes who claimed to be the incarnation of God’s will on earth and therefore above challenge. A set of mechanisms based on “reason and right” had supplanted the principle of rule by God’s chosen lieutenant, as a better guarantee of just, uncorrupt government.

The United States and other countries spent the next two centuries testing and perfecting these mechanisms—sometimes in bitter and bloody strife—and expanding the rights they guaranteed and the categories of people thought to be endowed with those rights. And though it developed in the West, this basic structure of government was adopted—at least in its outward forms—by many of the new nations in Asia and Africa when they won their independence from colonial powers.

But what if that finely tuned device is captured in turn by some tight-knit network, intent on its own enrichment? What happens if the careful contraption is repurposed to serve the interests of this criminal network, which has gained control of the levers of power that matter—the army or other security forces, the civil service, the financial system—and has reworded legislation that was designed to curb abuses to allow it to “circumvent law by law” ?

Some people, in that case, are likely to discard that rational mechanism altogether. Some people will appeal for an “alternative, upright methodology, in which it is not the business of any class of humanity to
lay down its own laws to its own advantage, at the expense of the other classes.” And that infallible methodology, argued Osama bin Laden in a 2007 video, “is the methodology of God Most High.”
⁴⁹

Some people, in other words, will turn back to God. Lured by militant advocates of a religious ordering of human affairs, they will seek to roll back four hundred years of political history.

And that is exactly what the great seventeenth-century political thinker John Locke predicted would happen.

Where an appeal to law, and constituted judges, lies open, but the remedy is denied by a manifest perverting of justice, and the barefaced wresting of the laws to protect or indemnify the violence or injuries of some men or party of men, there it is hard to imagine any thing but a state of war: for wherever violence is used, and injury done—though by hands appointed to administer justice—it is still violence and injury, however colored with the name, pretenses or forms of law, the end whereof being to protect and redress the innocent, by an unbiassed application of it . . . ; wherever that is not bona fide done, war is made on the sufferers, who having no appeal on earth to right them, they are left to the only remedy in such cases, an appeal to heaven.
⁵⁰

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Violent Extremists

W
ait a second.

As I worked through this historical material, riveted by the saga of a carefully constructed mechanism coming to replace God as the main principle ordering government, I could not ignore one glaring fact: the people engaged in that process were practically all Protestants.
^*

Why Protestantism? What is the link between reformed religion and representative government as a device to ensure the redress of grievances? Searching for answers to that question, I discovered something else: a separate strand tying corruption to religious extremism. This strand is not bounded by the arc of specific historical events; it is remarkably consistent through time.

But to unearth it, I had to go back to the source:

“The Reverend Father Martin Luther, Master of Arts and Sacred Theology . . . intends to defend the following statements.” So, legend has it, read a handbill that was tacked up on the carved wooden door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg, Germany, on October 31, 1517, inviting scholars to a public debate on a long list of propositions.

1. When our Lord and Master Jesus Christ said, “Repent” (Matthew 4:17), he willed the entire life of believers to be one of repentance.

2. This word cannot be understood as referring to the sacrament of penance . . . as administered by the clergy.

Luther’s historic Ninety-Five Theses founded Protestantism, one of the most far-reaching intellectual and spiritual revolutions in human history. And these first two statements certainly sound theological in nature. Yet they were written in a temporal context—a context, it turns out, that had a lot to do with corruption.

In Luther’s day, Christians who had sinned were expected to regret their misdeeds—to feel remorse or “repentance,” the key word in the first thesis—and to prove their contrition by performing humbling acts such as fasting or almsgiving. Only then could they regain full membership in the community and ensure their salvation after death.

Accomplishment of difficult or humiliating deeds, and a priest’s determination that they were sufficient to cancel out the sin, was “the sacrament of penance,” the key phrase in Luther’s second thesis. For many, the importance of performing these physical acts overshadowed that of the inward psychic reality of repentance.

People who died having confessed their sins but failed to perform penance were believed to incur a kind of debt, which they would have to pay off by suffering pain for some time in a limbo called purgatory. Lurid images in church windows and stonework, and the horrifying language of weekly sermons, frightened congregations with the agonies awaiting them should they die with accounts due.

Over time, church authorities began to offer people a dodge to avoid
actually performing the penitential acts. They could purchase “indulgences” after confessing their sins. The vendors of these indulgences were eventually authorized to receive confession and administer absolution, though they were not priests.

In other words, just by handing over some money to buy an indulgence, a person could, in a single brief transaction, go through all the steps that guaranteed passage to heaven. Or even get a deceased loved one released from the torments of purgatory, by buying an indulgence in his or her name. The church had stumbled on a huge business. People started bankrupting themselves.

In 1515 a special indulgence was put up for sale in Germany. Cash-strapped Pope Leo X wanted to complete the construction of a magnificent church in Rome. The archbishop of Mainz—who had borrowed heavily to purchase his position, along with two other lucrative posts—was put in charge of the marketing campaign. Half the proceeds of the sale were earmarked for his creditor. So vital did the archbishop consider this mission that he ordered all other religious preaching to stop when vendors arrived in a town to hawk the indulgence.
¹

This was the context in which Luther composed his theses, which included:

27. They preach only human doctrines who say that as soon as the money clinks into the money chest, the soul flies out of purgatory. . . .

50. Christians are to be taught that if the pope knew the exactions of the indulgence preachers, he would rather that the basilica of St. Peter were burned to ashes than built up with the skin, flesh, and bones of his sheep. . . .

72. Let him who guards against the lust and license of the indulgence preachers be blessed.

Luther’s theses—the genesis of the Reformation—were in large part an indictment of corruption.

So was a missive he wrote three years later, “To the Christian Nobility of the German Nation.” Luther was a sensation by then; his theses,
printed in Latin and German, had spread as far as Switzerland. They were drawing fervent applause from Germans of all ranks. The pope was threatening to excommunicate him.

Luther’s response was an open rebuke to the Holy Father. “It is shocking to see the . . . vicar of Christ . . . going about in such a worldly and ostentatious style that neither king nor emperor can equal,” he wrote. “This kind of splendor is offensive.”
²

In the twenty-first century, Afghans and Tunisians and Uzbeks found such ostentation offensive in their governing officials too.

Rome, wrote Luther, is full of “buying, selling, bartering, changing, trading, drunkenness, lying, deceiving, robbing, stealing, luxury, harlotry, knavery. . . . And out of this sea the same kind of morality flows into all the world.”
³