"The Natural State of Human Rule"

by Liberty and Power

George Will has an intriguing and unusually thoughtful column in Newsweek:

The president correctly says,"It's not a civil war." But that is bad news. Were it a civil war, many Iraqis would be eagerly fighting the insurgents, and we could help them. Perhaps Iraqis are, as the president says,"a proud and independent people." But they have no living memory of moderate politics of which they can be proud. Hence America's necessarily hurried attempts to build political and civil structures that will generate and legitimize an Iraqi leader who can be more durable than Kerensky was.
These attempts are Wilsonian, expressing President Woodrow Wilson's belief that America's mission—a practical mission—is to pacify the world by multiplying free governments. Wilson, a former professor of political science, was not the last or wisest Wilson in that profession.
Three and a half decades ago, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then an adviser to Richard Nixon, urged the president to listen to"the smartest man in America." James Q. Wilson still is that. He had been Moynihan's colleague on the Harvard faculty, and is the pre-eminent political scientist of our time. ...
[Bush] might profit from pondering the foreign policy pertinence of this James Q. Wilson thought about why the combination of economic affluence and personal freedom is an achievement relatively rare in human experience:
"So common have despotic regimes been that some scholars have argued that they are, unhappily, the natural state of human rule. This tendency raises a profound question: Does human nature lend itself to freedom? It is not difficult to make arguments for personal freedom, but the history of mankind suggests that human autonomy usually will be subordinated to political control. If that is true, then our effort to increase individual freedom is an evolutionary oddity, a weak and probably vain effort to equip people with an opportunity some do not want and many will readily sacrifice."

And I agree with the second part of Will's last point:"Pessimists are right more often than not, and when they are wrong they are pleased to be so."

Nothing would have pleased me more than to have been completely wrong about my predictions of the disastrous effects of our current foreign policy, both internationally and domestically. But after an enormous amount of reading and thinking, I was convinced that I was right -- as events tragically continue to confirm every day.

P.S. I discussed how rare the achievement of genuine freedom has been historically in much more detail in this post.

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More Comments:

Arthur Frederick Silber - 4/18/2004

Thank you for your wonderful and thought-provoking comments, Gus. At a first readthrough, I don't think there is anything I disagree with you about, in fact. (Although I grant that was not at all clear from my initial post.) Will *is* pretty good on baseball, though. So I guess I cut him a tiny, tiny, tiny sliver of slack for that. But otherwise, he's a rather typical rightwing SOB. No disagreement there.

Gus diZerega - 4/18/2004

I also predicted disaster in Iraq - for largely Hayekian reasons. Social engineering on such a scale is as impossible as central economic planning. The so-called "conservatives" and "classical liberals" who supported the war committed the same kind of error for which they continually, and correctly, criticize the shrinking band of liberals and socialists who favor government economic planning.

BUT - and this is an important but - George Will's broader conclusions are rot. Will does not understand human freedom, and perhaps never did. He himself has written how the "state" should practice "soulcraft" - an exercise in egotistical megalomania on a huge scale. Will is no friend of freedom, no friend of democracy, and no friend of the principles this country was founded on over 200 years ago. I guess he's pretty good on baseball.

The spread of markets, science, and democracy is an historical event without precedent. It has so transformed the societies of those who have adopted these institutions that, if we were explaining it biologically, we would say a new species has arisen. Even those societies currently far from capable of supporting these institutions now generally give them lip service. For the first time in human history the majority of the world's economic and military power is in the hands of relatively free societies. By some measures we could add that a majority of the population lives within democratic societies as well.

The natural state of human beings is not despotism. If there is a natural state, it is living in small bands that are anything but despotic. That covers most of humankind’s history. Despotisms have existed for a few thousand years in some places. That's not negligible, but it is hardly evidence of our incapacity to live in relatively free societies.

When larger societies arose that were not based on domination they proved enormously successful by any criteria. That despotic societies appear incapable of handling the complexity of the modern world and so either must make their wealth by selling raw materials (the Middle East for example), begin to transform away from despotism (the growing rule of law in China), or sit mired in misery (too much of Africa) is powerful evidence that it is Will's right wing acceptance of despotism that is at fault here.

But countries have to develop free institutions largely in their own way. One size does not fit all. Here is the tragedy of Iraq, along with the moral bankruptcy of men like Will who, having avoided ever serving under arms themselves, write how we need to be brutal in suppressing people in other places, apparently so we can craft their souls.