I'm going to start by trying to pick up on a thread of comments where Thomas D. and I were discussing Mexico and some historical analogs. I will lightly edit these comments for length and content; you can see the originals if you like in the original thread, but please respond here instead of there to ease the discussion.
As we enter the discussion, we were discussing a list of massacres in Mexico. It was part of a longer exchange on whether it is true that government is always the biggest threat; I think it always is potentially, and therefore should be restrained even when there are other key threats. Thomas was unsure about this and fielded spirited rebuttals.
Grim: When we see actual genocides and democides worldwide, it is not criminal organizations but governments that carry them out. As I've said before, in the bloody 20th century your own government was more likely to kill you than its enemies. The Nazis killed more Germans (and German nationals who didn't qualify as 'German enough') than even the Soviets did; the Soviets starved more of their own citizens than even the Nazis killed. The Japanese militarist government did horrible things to the Chinese people, but not nearly so many Chinese died in all of the horrors of the Japanese occupation as died in Mao's "Great Leap Forward."
There are some limit cases where we can debate whether the organization is a sort-of government, as you noted before. The Rwandan militias were sort of government, sort of a riot that the government allowed to go on rampages. Hamas is a currently relevant example; they are in some sense both a government and a terrorist organization that engages in criminal activity (but, to be honest, so does everyone's government -- the United States was tied up in some of those Mexican military murders, and even in some of the cartel ones...).A criminal organization is organized for the purpose of crime, which is to say money and power; a government is organized for the same purpose, except that they also claim the power to define what counts as crime. Sometimes they might slip one into the other, but government has by its nature more potential to harm, which is why the worst actual harms come from them.
By the way, not on the list of Mexican massacres is the largest massacre in American history: the Goliad massacre by Santa Anna's forces. More than four hundred prisoners were executed by what claimed, at that time, to be their government; it shows up on our list instead because of one of those successful revolutions you were mentioning.
Thomas Doubting: Your point about the 20th century democides and genocides is well-taken, but let me point out the private violence that brought much of that about. The Soviet Union and China were both the result of successful Marxist revolutions. The Nazis and Italian fascists had their private armies, the SA & SS and the Blackshirts, who helped them attain political power. The Japanese militarists were assisted by young men who assassinated successful businessmen for promoting capitalism and any politician who openly advocated for democracy. In all of these cases, these nations were pushed toward totalitarianism and militarism by private violence.In addition, the new governments of the USSR, China, and Nazi Germany came about in part as political movements focused on internal enemies by private powers, which, once they could, took on the mantle of government to continue their pursuit of their internal enemies. It is no wonder such governments killed so many of their own. Given the strong-man totalitarianism, these governments acted much like the private organizations of individual men: Stalin, Mao, Hitler. I don't know if their examples can be generalized to all governments.Grim: Likewise, your point about the private armies striving for control of the government -- the Nazis versus the Communists in Germany is a good example -- demonstrates that they themselves understood the value of coming to control it instead of being a private army. Coupled with the further proof of the additional harm such forces were able to accomplish after winning control of the government, I think it is a compelling argument for my position.
14 comments:
Before digging in to the argument, I would like to add that I had made the point that the people themselves are often the most powerful component. The fact that there have been successful revolutions shows that there are times and places where the people are the most powerful player on the board.
I think this is further supported by the great efforts many governments go to in order to control what the people can know, think, and say. They fear the people, or it would not matter.
I think you may be conflating 'most powerful' and 'most dangerous.' The government is always the most potentially dangerous force; the people taking power by revolution to overthrow a government is a demonstration of greater power, but not greater danger.
It's not a danger because the people should do that when they decide it is merited; all governments are rightly subject to revolution when they merit it in the eyes of the people (the terms of which are spelled out permanently in the Declaration of Independence).
That isn't clear to me. It would seem, if I understand your point, that when a government does what it should, it isn't dangerous. However, the fact that the government may do what it shouldn't makes it potentially dangerous.
By that reasoning, though, the people can also be dangerous. For example, some revolutions may be unjustified. Riots also are a case of unjustified violence by the people. Organized crime, too.
No, I think the government is very dangerous even when it is doing what it ought to do. It can never be left unwatched because of the perils it poses should it go wrong. Even when it is not actually endangering people, it is potentially doing so.
The people, by contrast, are sovereign. To say that they are dangerous to the government is to invert the relationship between them: the government is rightly in their power to alter or to abolish as they find it out of line. That isn't a danger to the government, it is a correction of it.
Sometimes people do it badly, but they have a right to do it. The Russian Revolution that produced the Soviet Union was badly handled, but it wasn't because the people were wrong to throw off the Czars. It's because the next government proved to be at least as actually dangerous to them and their rights as the one they had thrown off. When that happens, the answer is another revolution: peacefully or not, for the people to alter or to abolish the Soviet Union.
To say that they are dangerous to the government is to invert the relationship between them
To be clear, an unjust revolution is dangerous to the people. One group of the people form a private army to overthrow the government, but they are doing so unjustly. They will almost certainly cause great damage to the part of the people who are not engaged in their revolution or who may resist their injustices.
Regardless of the right of revolution, part or all of the people may be wicked and may be very invested in oppressing their neighbors. Much of organized crime works that way through extortion. As justifiable as the French Revolution was, I've read that it soon turned into neighbors settling old scores; plenty of peasants died in the bloodbath that followed the elimination of crown and nobility.
Neither "the government" nor "the people" are singular objects. The government can fight itself; the people can fight each other. Any concentration of power, public or private, is a potential danger.
To maintain the language of the Declaration of Independence, you have to maintain the categories. Groups of people can fight each other -- as indeed they did in the Revolution, where many supported the British remaining the government and fought quite brutally in some places to try to keep it so. If you want to sophisticate the discussion by creating those divisions, you end up doing history instead of philosophy: now we're discussing the Revolutionary War and not when revolution, in general, is legitimate and valid.
Both history and philosophy have their uses; I have a MA in history as well as my doctorate in philosophy. However, you have to decide between them in an activity. In a way, they are diametrically opposed because history favors the particular and exact, philosophy seeks the universal and logical (logical objects being an abstraction of reality by nature, as we have often discussed).
So I don't really accept that revolutions by the people, if it's a large enough group of the people to make a revolution good, could be illegitimate. It won't of course be everyone; and in fact they often do come out badly. But to take the other example you were discussing, in the Weimar Republic there were two private armies striving both against each other and trying to take the power of the formal government (in order to make themselves more powerful and more dangerous). Neither a Marxist revolution nor a Nazi revolution was desirable; but neither was it wrong to overthrow the Weimar Republic, which deserved it quite richly.
Sometimes in life there aren't good options, and you just have to do the best you can.
I would think you of all people would be more concerned with accumulations of power rather than dangerousness. I think it's a fairly artificial division as well, as I think of the French revolution and how that may not have had that much merit and really succeeded in creating a system that aggregates even more power than a monarchy can by systematizing it. A monarch is but one man, and one need only remove the one man to topple it (potentially). We have come to see how hard it is to uproot an entrenched class of elites who hold power in a more distributed, extra governmental fashion. I think this also points out how the extra governmental organizations (NGOs, corporations, influential charities, PACs) are even worse then government.
I am concerned about concentrations of power; you're right that this has been a central theme of what I've said. Back towards the beginning of the blog, I used to talk about the separation of powers and Federalism as helpful precisely because they divided the power into opposing camps; political liberty is often created in the gap between opposing powers. It's not just that Congress has one remit and the Executive another, but that the states can resist the Federal government with power of their own.
You can see something similar when cultural institutions or religious ones are powerful enough to resist the state to some degree.
But then it's not merely that we should empower another institution to pull against the first one. The idea was that doing so tended to limit or eliminate the power of the institutions to compel the people; it's like putting a second magnet with a similar charge near a first one, thus creating a repulsion rather than a compulsion effect. You can effectively balance or eliminate the effects of the field on other nearby objects (analogously, members of the public).
The problem with the extra-governmental organizations you cite is that they weren't designed to do that, but to reinforce the power of the government. You've seen how quickly USAID can be destroyed, or Harvard made to pay half a billion dollars in remittances, if the government becomes opposed to them. That also, however, shows how much more dangerous the government is than these institutions; it is the real threat (currently to them, which is healthy; but reverse the polarity of the government, and they all clamp down magnetically together again).
Yes, back to Sowell again.
If you want to sophisticate the discussion by creating those divisions, you end up doing history instead of philosophy...
Well, I'm doing my PhD in history, so ...
However, I think philosophy uninformed by history creates mirages. It is too easy to bracket out important things when all you're dealing with is ideas. I am not saying that's what you are doing here, but I am saying that it is a hazard.
Also, I have a high opinion of philosophy. I think it can handle the kind of sophistication that history both offers and demands. It may mean adjusting our categories, but if that is justified, it should be done.
There is a great deal of danger of mirages in philosophy. Hegel is widely regarded as one of the greatest philosophers, but his approach to what he calls 'the phenomenology of spirit' is almost entirely mirages. Kant tried to avoid the problem by building things out on practical reason, which people really loved; many still love the Groundwork to the Metaphysics of Morals. No one at all, however, ended up liking how he actually thought those rational principles applied; when he got around to the Metaphysics of Morals itself, it was (and remains) widely panned and ridiculed. (It has some pretty astonishing conclusions, which Kant assures us that any rational person will of course reach by applying that Order of Reason that is the same for all of us.) It's not only Marx who invented things that may not exist, systems that may not be real, and processes that don't really seem to apply.
What I mean to say here is that you can't change the Declaration of Independence's categories if we're discussing its principles. It won't do to say, "It is the right of the people to alter or to abolish the government under these circumstances..." if you 'sophisticate' the categories so that there's fifteen peoples, some of whom overlap with the three or ten governments. You will have broken the model.
You are allowed to reject the model, and propose a new one with categories you like better. However, in the case of the Declaration (or even, to a lesser degree, the Constitution) to do so is itself revolutionary.
As for using historical examples in philosophy, sure; I do that all the time. We've been doing it constantly in this discussion.
However, I will caution you against imposing too much philosophy on history either! When you are doing history, get the facts right. Say exactly what happened to exactly whom and, insofar as you can, exactly why. Imposing a philosophy about what should be true about the facts is how the Marxist historians often go wrong; 'It should be, according to our philosophy, that the factory owners were conspiring to oppress labor, so let's assume that is true and work it in as if we had the same sort of evidence we do for the fact that the laborer brought a pistol and a knife and tried to kill the factory owner.'
You can see how the philosophy introduced into the history instantly poses a risk of altering our understanding of why what happened did happen, perhaps even inverting the causality. Use examples from history to find philosophical principles; be careful of using philosophical principles to explore history.
Points all well-taken. That is indeed my main objection to Marxist historiography.
What I mean to say here is that you can't change the Declaration of Independence's categories if we're discussing its principles.
Yes ... yes. Now I will have to go back and re-think some things, and think some other things through that I hadn't before.
So, if we are going to stay within the categories of the Declaration, how do we understand those categories? Our conversation broke down at questions about how to understand the people and the government, but the Declaration is a brief summary of ideas and doesn't explain its own concepts. Should / can we look to Locke and other sources of those ideas? What sources would you look to?
I tend to talk about the Declaration of Independence in terms of the historical traditions that led up to it, including for example the Declaration of Arbroath. Locke is one of those, though he isn't a straight-line source that the Declaration borrows from without alteration. Jefferson's earlier work is a great source, as are his later elaborations in his letters.
And if you're just exploring the concepts, many things are fair game that wouldn't count as strict definitions. Here's a bit I like, part of the Frith & Freedom section of links on the sidebar:
https://grimbeorn.blogspot.com/2010/07/liberty-by-law.html
Since we've been spending so much time with Aristotle, here's another post from that section that considers some of his views on law and justice.
https://grimbeorn.blogspot.com/2014/05/justice-and-law-ii.html
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