30 September 2008
Every year, the San Francisco Public Library puts on a huge used book sale
fundraiser that’s a pretty fantastic source of obscure books at bargain
prices. This time around I picked up a copy of Milton Mayer’s
On Liberty: Man
v. The State.
Mayer looks at the historical conflict between government and liberty, and
at the various philosophical, legal, and revolutionary methods people have
devised to resolve it. He concludes that all of these have been incoherent
and self-contradictory. The liberal ideal of a state that operates only
within strict restraints, with the consent of the governed, and with a goal
of maximizing and defending individual liberty is a pipe dream — and
its most famous proponents end up unwittingly reducing our options to
tyranny or anarchy.
He gives a number of examples from the United States in which
“inalienable†rights found themselves alienated without much
trouble, and in which the state discovered reasons why, on one occasion
after another, it would have to reach just a little bit further beyond the
carefully enumerated powers of the Constitution and into the carefully
guarded Rights in the Bill of. Here’s a great example that almost
reads like it comes out of today’s headlines:
…Attorney General John Mitchell revealed that the FBI had ignored the
Congressional requirement of a court order to listen in on the conversation
of youth leaders indicted for allegedly inciting riots at the Democratic
National Convention of 1968 — and would go on doing so.
“While it may be appropriate,†said Mr. Mitchell, “for
Congress to establish rules limiting the investigative techniques which the
Executive may employ in enforcing the laws the Congress has enacted, a
serious question exists as to the power to restrict the President’s
power to gather information which he deems necessary to the proper exercise
of powers which the Constitution confers on him alone. If the Congress
cannot tell the President whom he should employ to direct the Army, there is
a strong basis to argue that Congress cannot tell the President what means
he may employ to obtain information which he needs to determine the proper
deployment of his forces … The President… has the
constitutional power to authorize electronic surveillance to gather
intelligence information concerning domestic organizations which seek to
attack and subvert the Government by unlawful means.â€
The various lines in the sand beyond which an individual, a conscience,
and the home that is their castle may not be invaded by the state —
whether in the rigorous formulations of political philosophers or in the
legal scaffoldings of Supreme Court justices — Mayer shows to be
easily wiped away by the next wave.
Does Mayer have any better ideas? “The problem may be
insoluble,†he says near the beginning of the book, “which is not
to say that it is a dead horse that will bear no beating.†At the end
of many pages of beating, though, the horse doesn’t appear to have
moved much, and although he starts by saying that “to rest on the
proposition that the central problem of political life — the problem
that is politics — is insoluble is to accept the counsel of
despair†he ends on what seems to me, by this criterion, to be a
despairing note:
The immediate issue is not whether the problem of liberty and authority is
soluble. Nor is it whether we are condemned to go on crying,
“Liberty,†without knowing what we are crying. The immediate
issue is whether we have any ground for asserting the problem’s
solubility (or insolubility) without consciously confronting the problem;
the question is whether we are manipulating it for purposes of propaganda,
deceit, and self-deceit.
One of the joys (or exasperations) of reading old books is to see
today’s arguments dressed up in yesterday’s clothes. As with
the Mitchell quote above that would not be surprising to find paraphrased
in a position paper by John Yoo today, there’s an interesting
appendix in which Mayer discusses his argument with young
“fellows†of the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions
(which published the book). This would have been around 1969. There’s
a part of the discussion in which one of the participants says that perhaps
a society composed of small, independent, diversely-organized communes might
be a solution to Mayer’s dilemma.
Mayer responds: “The difficulty is that your communes would still
exist in a world, a cosmos, made up of governments… Within this
cosmos there may be ‘free’ groups, ‘free’ communes,
living any way they want — but only so long as they pay their taxes, go
to war, get their vaccinations, go to school, marry one woman at a time,
etc.â€
But his debate partner says it doesn’t have to be that way. We have
other models we can choose from: “in the Moslem world there were
various principalities living very close to each other with vastly different
laws… This was also true of the early European folk societies.â€
Mayer shoots back that modern technology — “J. Edgar Hoover and
Samuel F. B. Morse†— has made inevitable the supremacy of big
states over small kingdoms and societies. But his debate partner responds
— and I couldn’t help imagining this on an old-school paper and
pencil version of a Boing Boing comment thread or something of the like:
I think the pluralism I’m talking about is possible because of the
technology. The computers can be used, for example, to help people with
similar interest and life styles get together.
Technotribal utopianism circa 1969. Groovy.
Earlier this month, I related the story of
Mike Palecek, who got hit with a “frivolous filing penaltyâ€
warning letter when he enclosed a letter of protest with his tax return.
His story
has since been picked up by the Des Moines Register.
It turns out that the adjective “frivolous†has a long history of
being applied to uncomfortable protest statements —
critics of the
U.S. Declaration
of Independence called its complaints “false and frivolous.â€
There are some interesting threads ongoing on the
wtr-s mailing list
about whether or not there is a war tax resistance “movement†in
the United States, and if so, who qualifies for membership.
Thanks to the
Carnival of Market Anarchy
and Gay Tax Protest
for plugging The Picket Line.
